Betulinic acid (BA), a naturally occurring triterpene found in the bark of the white birch tree, has been investigated to induce apoptosis in various cancer cells and animal models. However, there is no report of the chemopreventive effect of BA in cervical cancer cells. Using KB human cervical cancer cells as a model, we currently show that BA decreases cell viability and induces apoptotic cell death. The mechanism of the BA-induced anti-growth response in KB cells is due to the down-regulation of specificity protein 1 (Sp1) and its downstream targets, myeloid cell leukemia-1(Mcl-1) and survivin. Thus, BA acts as a novel chemopreventive agent through the regulation of Sp1that is highly expressed in tumors.

Background : Mulberry (Morus alba L.), renowned for their medicine benefits and the leave as the sole food for silkworm (Bombyx mori). To understanding the molecular mechanism of color formation and nutritive value in different mulberry fruit varieties, we use high-throughput transcriptome sequencing technique to investigated the anthocyanin and betulinic biosynthesis pathway related functional genes. In addition, the total antosyanin and betuinic acid contend were also measured. Methods and Results : The resulting cDNA library was then sequenced using an Illumina HiSeq™ 2000 system. The clean reads were assembled using Trinity software, Then perform gene family clustering to get final unigenes. The pH differential method was used to determine the total anthocyanin content (TAC) of methanol extract from the red and white mulberry, and High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) analysis was used to quantify the triterpenes content. In this study, total 50,149 unigenes with an average length of 1,125 nt and N50 equaling 1,861 nt were generated. Using these transcriptome sequecing, cDNAs encoding anthocyanin biosynthetic genes and triterpene biosynthetic genes were isolated. In addition, total anthocyanins and betulinic acid content were analyzed. A great amount of total anthocyanins (59.16 mg/g) were found in fully ripe fruit of Cheongil. Accumulation of betulin and betulinic acid were also detected in all stages of Cheongil and Turkey fruits with small amount. Conclusion : The results of transcriptome sequencing provide useful information at molecular lever in mulberry research, such as interesting gene discovering, marker assisted molecular breeding, and interesting metabolic pathway investigate. The gene expression results could help us understanding of the molecular mechanisms of different fruit color determining factor.