Ocimum sanctum: a potential source of anti-cancer agent and its role in restoration of Maspin via Snail and HDACs in Breast cancer

Abstract

With cancer being a wide spread threat to humanity, plants have an important role in cancer prevention and in therapy. Medicinal plants provide new active chemo-preventive molecules. It is suspected that Ocimum sanctum would be a potent weapon discovered so far in fighting against all kinds of Cancer. There are many HDAC inhibtiors, but they are toxic in nature, this study aim at finding a phytochemical which is less toxic to human. For this ethanolic and methanolic extract of Tulsi leaves and inflorescence were detected to check whether they contain any components that can inactivate HDAC and can activate tumor suppressor genes. Further the anti- proliferative and anti-apoptoic effect of ethanolic and methanolic extract is studied. The role of theses extracts on the expression of tumor suppressor gene (Maspin), transcriptional factor (Snail), and epigenetic modulator (HDAC1, HDAC2) is investigated along with their anti-migratory effects on cancer cells. It is very much clear from the current investigation that the tulsi leaf and inflorescence extracts have the anti-cancer potential. This anti-cancer potential is due to the combinatorial effect of anti-proliferative, apoptotic and anti-migratory effect of the tulsi extracts. It is demonstrated from our experiments that the EETL exert more anti-cancer effect on breast cancer cells than METL and EETI. This investigation also demonstrates the higher efficacy of EENL in restoring the expression of maspin with concurrent enhancement of HDAC-1 and HDAC-2 mRNA levels, and reduced expression of snail. This reflects the HDAC inhibitory activity of tulsi extract.