Purpose. Arctigenin (ARG) is a natural lignan compound extracted from Arctium lappa and has displayed anticancer function and therapeutic effect in a variety of cancers. Arctigenin is mainly from Arctium lappa extract. It has been shown to induce autophagy in various cancers. However, as for whether arctigenin induces autophagy in gliomas or not, the specific mechanism is still worth exploring. Methods. Using CCK8, the monoclonal experiment was made to detect the proliferation ability. The scratch experiment and the transwell experiment were applied to the migration and invasion ability. PI/RNase and FITC-conjugated anti-annexin V were used to detect the cell cycle and apoptosis. Western blotting was used to determine the specified protein level, and constructed LC3B-GFP plasmid was used for analysis of autophagy.Results. Our research showed that ARG inhibited the growth and proliferation and invasion and migration of glioma cells in a dose-dependent manner (U87MG and T98G) and arrested the cell cycle and induced apoptosis. Interestingly, ARG induced autophagy in a dose-dependent manner. We applied Western blotting to measure the increase in the key autophagy protein LC3B, as well as some other autophagy-related proteins (increase in Beclin-1 and decrease in P62). In order to further explore the mechanism that ARG passed initiating autophagy to inhibit cell growth, we further found by Western blotting that AKT and mTOR phosphorylation proteins (P-AKT, P-mTOR) were reduced after ARG treatment, and we used AKT agonists to rescue, and the phosphorylated proteins of AKT and mTOR increased, and we found that the autophagy-related proteins were also reversed. And interestingly, the protein of apoptosis was also reversed along with autophagy. Conclusions. We thought ARG inhibited the proliferation of glioma cells by inducing autophagy and apoptosis through the AKT/mTOR pathway.

In the synthesis of chemical drugs used to treat various cancers and tumors,more and more scientists are now focusing on the development of natural extracts.Paeoniflorin,as an important compounds of the total glucosides of peony,,had therapeutic effects on a variety of cancers in vivo and in vitro experiments.The purpose of this study was to use biological information analysis to reveal the basic mechanism and potential molecular mechanism of paeoniflorin treatment.We evaluated the efficacy of paeoniflorin through Traditional Chinese Medicine Systems Pharmacology Database(TCMSP).The potential targets of paeoniflorin were identified and summarized by Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD),and GeneMANIA protein interaction analysis was performed online.Also.We used WebGestalt for Gene Ontology(GO) analysis and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes(KEGG) analysis and functional annotation.Finally,cytoscape was used to construct the paeoniflorin-target-pathway network to predict the results.

Arctigenin (ARG) is a natural lignan compound extracted from arctium lappa and has displayed anticancer functions and effective treatments in a variety of cancers.Studies had shown that Arctigenin(ARG) inhibits tumors through the AKT/MTOR pathway and mediates autophagy.However,the role in glioma cellshave not still fully understood.This study was designed to investigate whether Arctigenin(ARG) can mediateAKT/mTOR pathway in glioma to regulate autophagy,and affected glioma cells growth and survival.We found that the dose-dependent downregulation of Arctigenin(ARG),reducing cell proliferation,migration and invasion in two human glioblastoma cell lines (U87, T98G),These phenomena were reversed after the administration of the AKT agonist (SC79). Arctigenin(ARG) also affected other autophagy markers such as p62, LC3B.In addition, the apoptotic molecules cleaved-PARP,caspase-9, and cleaved-caspase3 were also dose-dependently altered.