Abstract: The experimental studies have demonstrated that some statins have an anticancer effect against ovarian cancer in vitro and in vivo, however, the potential molecular mechanism is still unclear. In the present study, high throughput RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) technology was applied to exploring the mRNA changes treated with simvastatin in the human ovarian cancer SKOV3 cell line. The result having been of CCK-8 assay shows that simvastatin inhibits significantly SKOV3 cell viability in a concentration-dependent manner, cell cycle means of flow cytometry analysis result shows cell cycle G1 phase arrest was induced in SKOV-3 cells with 10μg/ml simvastatin added for 24 h. The differential expression genes (DEGs) analysis of RNA-seq data shows there are a total of 372 DEGs found in the simvastatin group, of which 150 mRNAs are up-regulated and 222 mRNAs are down-regulated (fold change >2.0, q value < 0.05). Real time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) experiment has validated that the expression of KLF2, RHOB and CIDEB are up-regulated while those of DKK1, AMOTL2 and ANKRD1 are down-regulated. The DEGs are enriched in thirteen significant KEGG pathways including cell cycle and DNA replication and apoptosis etc. This study provides a supported useful information about transcriptome profiles of SKOV3 cell treat with simvastatin, and offers an application basis for the further researches on the mechanism of simvastatin in the treatment of ovarian cancer.

Key words: Simvastatin, Ovarian cancer, RNA sequencing, gene expression profile