Effects of Alkaloid from Angelicae Dahuricae Inducing Apoptosis and Increasing Bax/Bcl-2 Ratio on HeLa Cell

Angelicae dahuricae is one of the commonly herbal medicines of which the underlying mechanism is not clear yet. It was well established that plants have been a useful source of clinically relevant antitumor compound. In this study, the effect of alkaloid from Angelicae dahurica.(AAD) on inhibiting Hela cells growth and inducing apoptosis had been investigated by many approaches which include MTT, western blot and RT-PCR method in vitro model. Our results showed that AAD was able to inhibit the cell growth in a dose- and time-dependent manner, inhibit telomerase activity, decrease Bcl-2 and Survivin expression, increase slightly Bax expression in a dose-dependent manner in comparison to beta-actin mRNA quantity. In conclusion, the molecular mechanism responsible for apoptosis induced by AAD in HeLa cells is associated with the down-regulation of Bcl-2, up-regulation of Bax and inhibition telomerase activity.