Transcriptome Analysis of Inhibitory Effect of Astaxanthin Against HepG2 Cell Lines

Objective To investigate the gene expression differences of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cells treated with astaxanthin and to analyze its biological information.

Methods After treated with astaxanthin, the total RNA of HCC cells was extracted with TRIzol reagent. Illumina Truseq^TM RNA sample Prep Kit was used for RNA-seq library construction and sequencing. We analyzed the differentially-expressed genes and function enrichments.

Results Transcriptomic analysis showed that there were 39 642 566 and 497 155 920 reads in the control group and treatment group, respectively; the proportion of clean reads obtained by filtration were 94.89% and 93.56%, respectively. A total of 77 344 transcripts were detected, with 4 997 genes with significant differences in expression, among which 1 564 genes were up-regulated and 3 433 genes were down-regulated.

Conclusions Astaxanthin may participate in several biological processes and signaling pathways of tumors. Significant repression of translation process by astaxanthin may result in the growth inhibition of HCC.