Quercetin inhibits proliferation and invasion acts by up-regulating miR-146a in human breast cancer cells

Breast cancer is the most common female malignancies in the world which seriously impacts the female health. In recent years, various studies have been reported to determine the relevance of miRNAs to human cancer. One of these miRNAs, miR-146a has been downregulated in multiple human cancer types, but up-regulation showed inducing apoptosis. To determine the role of quercetin treated on breast cancer, we investigated the effect of quercetin on cell proliferation in human breast cancer cell lines MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231 with/without transfection of miR-146a mimic or anti-miR-146a. Furthermore, the expressions of bax and cleaved-caspase-3, mainly were increased in control and overexpression miR-146a groups, however, the expression of EGFR was inverse. All the results demonstrated that quercetin exhibited excellent effect on inhibiting cell proliferation in human breast cancer cells, which was performed by up-regulating miR-146a expression, then via inducing apoptosis through caspase-3 activation and mitochondrial-dependent pathways, and inhibiting invasion through down-regulating the expression of EGFR.