Abstract
BackgroundSi-Wu-Tang (SWT), comprising the combination of four herbs, Paeoniae, Angelicae, Chuanxiong and Rehmanniae, is one of the most popular traditional oriental medicines for women’s diseases. In our previous study, the microarray gene expression profiles of SWT on breast cancer cell line MCF-7 were found similar to the effect of β-estradiol (E2) on MCF-7 cells in the Connectivity Map database.MethodsFurther data analysis was conducted to find the main similarities and differences between the effects of SWT and E2 on MCF-7 gene expression. The cell proliferation assay on MCF-7 (ER-positive) and MDA-MB-231 (ER-negative) cells were used to examine such estrogenic activity. The estrogenic potency of SWT was further confirmed by estrogen-responsive element (ERE) luciferase reporter assay in MCF-7 cells.ResultsMany estrogen regulated genes strongly up-regulated by E2 were similarly up-regulated by SWT, e.g., GREB1, PGR and EGR3. Of interest with regard to safety of SWT, the oncogenes MYBL1 and RET were strongly induced by E2 but not by SWT. Quantitative RT-PCR analysis revealed a highly concordant expression change in selected genes with data obtained by microarrays. Further supporting SWT’s estrogenic activity, in MCF-7 but not in MDA-MB-231 cells, SWT stimulated cell growth at lower concentrations (< 3.0 mg/ml), while at high concentrations, it inhibits the growth of both cell lines. The growth inhibitory potency of SWT was significantly higher in MDA-MB-231 than in MCF-7 cells. The SWT-induced cell growth of MCF-7 could be blocked by addition of the estrogen receptor antagonist tamoxifen. In addition, SWT was able to activate the ERE activity at lower concentrations. The herbal components Angelicae, Chuanxiong and Rehmanniae at lower concentrations (< 3.0 mg/ml) also showed growth-inducing and ERE-activating activity in MCF-7 cells.ConclusionsThese results revealed a new mechanism to support the clinical use of SWT for estrogen related diseases and possibly for cancer prevention. This study also demonstrated the feasibility of using microarray transcriptional profiling to discover phytoestrogenic components that are present in natural products.
Highlights
Si-Wu-Tang (SWT), comprising the combination of four herbs, Paeoniae, Angelicae, Chuanxiong and Rehmanniae, is one of the most popular traditional oriental medicines for women’s diseases
Since the same microarrays (Affymetrix Human Genome U133 Plus 2.0) have been used in several previous studies for the analysis of MCF-7 cells treated with E2 for 3, 6 or 12 hours [29,30,31], we compared the data derived from these studies available at the NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) Profiles at the site http://www.ncbi.nlm. nih.gov/geoprofiles
It is impossible for the selected 45 probes to include the whole set of genes regulated by the estrogen receptors, we believe that such selection represents a subset of reliable “estrogen-responsive genes” or “fingerprint of estrogen treatment” on the MCF-7 cells
Summary
Si-Wu-Tang (SWT), comprising the combination of four herbs, Paeoniae, Angelicae, Chuanxiong and Rehmanniae, is one of the most popular traditional oriental medicines for women’s diseases. Si-Wu-Tang [SWT, Si-Wu decoction (Chinese name), Samultang (Korean name), or Shimotsu-to (Japanese name)], comprising the combination of four herbs, Paeoniae, Angelicae, Chuanxiong and Rehmanniae, is one of the most popular traditional oriental medicines for women’s health [1]. It has been used in Eastern Asia for about one thousand years for various women’s diseases and ranks first as the most frequently used Chinese medicines in several surveys [2]. Another clinical study demonstrated that SWT can be integrated as an alternative therapy within Western medicine [11]
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