Inhibitory Effects of a Chemically Standardized Extract from Scutellaria barbata in Human Colon Cancer Cell Lines, LoVo

Scutellaria barbata (SB) is a medicinal plant that contains flavonone compounds such as scutellarein, scutellarin, carthamidin, isocarthamidin, and wogonin. A functional proteomic approach was used to study the inhibitory effects of a chemically standardized extract from SB in human colon adrencarcinoma, LoVo. In this work, a stable isotope was not used in the proposed method developed. The whole cell lysates from the control and treated cells were digested with trypsin, and the peptides were separated by two-dimensional (cation-exchange and reversed-phase) liquid chromatography and tandem mass spectrometry. The differentially expressed proteins identified using the current approach supported the data obtained from cell-cycle analysis with flow cytometry. With flow-cytometry analysis, a significant increase in the sub G₁ phase was observed with a higher dose of extract from SB. Our results suggest that the chemically standardized extract from SB can induce cell death in the human colon cancer cell line. Our current work showed that the proposed platform provided a rapid approach to study the molecular mechanism because of the inhibitory effects of different doses of the botanical extracts on LoVo cell lines. This included a network of proteins involved in metabolism, regulation of the cell cycle, and transcription-factor activity.

Keywords: Proteomic analysis; cell death; human colon cancer cell lines (LoVo); two-dimensional liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry; Scutellaria barbata