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VOL. 76 (3), 343-356, 2010 CYTOTOXIC ACTIVITY OF a-HUMELENE AND...

Figure 3. Cytotoxic activity (%) of S. officinalis essential oil and its fractions
in a dose-dependent pattern (12.5- 800 µg/ml) for the RAW264.7 breast cancer
cell line. Values are expressed as mean ± S.D of three independent experiments in
triplicate.

4. DISCUSSION

In our study S. officinalis leaf essential oil was analysed with CG-
MS and fractionated to identify the mainly cytotoxic compounds in
cancer cell lines. This species has been extensively investigated for its
chemical composition and pharmacological profile. Some diterpenoid
quinones (royleanone-SAR 3, horminone-SAR 26, and horminone-SAR
43) isolated from the roots of S. officinalis are able to induce cytotox-
ic and DNA-damaging activity in human colon carcinoma Caco-2 cells
and human hepatoma HepG2 cells in vitro conditions (20).

In the ssf F1.1.1, the main compound identified was a-humulene
(81.47%) which exhibited high cytotoxic activity in the murine
macrophage cells, colorectal adenocarcinoma cells and breast
melanoma cells. These results were in accordance with other data
which showed that the sesquiterpene fraction of S. officinalis with
the presence of a-humulene, demonstrate a strong cytotoxic activi-
ty in human prostate carcinoma LNCaP cells (21). In the same way,

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