title: Plant natural compounds: targeting pathways of autophagy as anti-cancer therapeutic agents.
abstract: Natural compounds derived from plant sources are well characterized as possessing a wide variety of remarkable anti-tumour properties, for example modulating programmed cell death, primarily referring to apoptosis, and autophagy. Distinct from apoptosis, autophagy (an evolutionarily conserved, multi-step lysosomal degradation process in which a cell destroys long-lived proteins and damaged organelles) may play crucial regulatory roles in many pathological processes, most notably in cancer. In this review, we focus on highlighting several representative plant natural compounds such as curcumin, resveratrol, paclitaxel, oridonin, quercetin and plant lectin - that may lead to cancer cell death - for regulation of some core autophagic pathways, involved in Ras-Raf signalling, Beclin-1 interactome, BCR-ABL, PI3KCI/Akt/mTOR, FOXO1 signalling and p53. Taken together, these findings would provide a new perspective for exploiting more plant natural compounds as potential novel anti-tumour drugs, by targeting the pathways of autophagy, for future cancer therapeutics.
authors: Department of Natural Products Chemistry, School of Traditional Chinese Materia Medica, Shenyang Pharmaceutical University, Shenyang, China.
authors: X
authors: X
authors: Zhang
authors: L-X
authors: LX
authors: Chen
authors: L
authors: L
authors: Ouyang
authors: Y
authors: Y
authors: Cheng
authors: B
authors: B
authors: Liu
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D000970:Antineoplastic Agents / Q000008:administration & dosage / Q000494:pharmacology*; D001343:Autophagy / Q000187:drug effects*; D016503:Drug Delivery Systems / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000188:drug therapy* / Q000378:metabolism / Q000473:pathology; D008517:Phytotherapy / Q000379:methods*; D028321:Plant Preparations / Q000008:administration & dosage / Q000494:pharmacology*; D015398:Signal Transduction / Q000187:drug effects
chemical_list: D000970:Antineoplastic Agents; D028321:Plant Preparations