Menthol effect on gene expression profile in malignant prostate cancer cell lines, PC-3

Menthol, a naturally occurring cooling compound of peppermint oil, induces an anti-proliferative activity in androgen-independent prostate cancer (AIPC). Previously, we found that menthol affects PC-3 cells viability through activating JNK but the mechanism is not fully clear. We thus studied that dysregulated cell cycle progression of PC-3 cells to menthol. We performed microarray experiments to obtain a global view of how menthol affects prostate cancer biology in gene expression profile. Our study demonstrated that menthol induced G2/M arrest by dysregulating PLK1 in the AICP cell model. Menthol was dissolved in ethanol as a vehicle at 0.1% working concentration and treated in PC-3 cells in triplicate Vehicle-treated PC-3 cells in triplicate were used as control.