Although arbutin is a natural product and widely used as an ingredient in skin care products, its effect on the gene expression level of human skin with malignant melanoma cells is rarely reported. We aim to investigate the genotoxic effect of arbutin on the differential gene expression profiling in A375 human malignant melanoma cells through its effect on tumorigenesis and related side-effect. The DNA microarray analysis provided the differential gene expression pattern of arbutin-treated A375 cells with the significant changes of 324 differentially expressed genes, containing 88 up-regulated genes and 236 down-regulated genes. The gene ontology of differentially expressed genes was classified as belonging to cellular component, molecular function and biological process. In addition, four down-regulated genes of AKT1, CLECSF7, FGFR3, and LRP6 served as candidate genes and correlated to suppress the biological processes in the cell cycle of cancer progression and in the downstream signaling pathways of malignancy of melanocytic tumorigenesis.

Toxicogenomics applications are increasingly applied to the evaluation of preclinical drug safety, and to explain toxicities associated with compounds at the mechanism level. In this review, we aim to describe the application of toxicogenomics tools for studying the genotoxic effect of active compounds on the gene-expression profile of A375 human malignant melanoma cells, through the other molecular functions of target genes, regulatory pathways and mechanisms of malignant melanomas. It also includes the current systems biology approaches, which are very useful for analyzing the biological system and understanding the entire mechanisms of malignant melanomas. We believe that this review would be very potent and useful for studying the toxicogenomics of A375 melanoma cells, and for further diagnostic and therapeutic applications.