Cotinus coggygria

Despite the significant progress in cancer treatment in recent years, the disease remains a leading cause of death worldwide. Histone deacetylases are a family of enzymes recognized as key regulators of the process of histone acetylation, a main epigenetic event involved in the control of gene transcription. High expression levels of histone deacetylases are distinctive for cancer cells and a searching for new more effective and less toxic histone deacetylase inhibitors with natural origin is a nowadays intensively studied research direction in cancer prevention and therapy. Cotinus coggygria is a medicinal plant possessing numerous valuable biological properties. The antitumor potential of C. coggygria extracts is poorly studied and the available data concerning the anticancer capacity of the Bulgarian herb are limited only to a previous research of the authors, which detected reduction in viability of breast cancer cell line MCF7 after treatment with aqueous ethanolic leaf extract. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the ability of C. coggygria extract to modify the process of histone acetylation by transcription analysis of nine genes coding for histone deacetylases after treatment of MCF7 cells for different time periods through quantitative Reverse Transcription - Polymerase Chain Reaction. The obtained results showed statistically significant reduction in the relative amount of HDAC5 and HDAC7 mRNA transcripts at 48 hour after treatment and a tendency of HDAC3 expression inhibition at 72 hour. Future investigations will be directed to assessment of the extract effect on the expression of genes coding histone acetyltransferases in MCF7 cells.