Fig. 1.

Icaritin inhibited AFP at the transcription level in hepatoma cells. The expression of AFP gene was detected in HepG2 and SMMC7721 cells treated with icaritin at different concentrations. a Icaritin inhibited AFP expression at protein level. The protein expression of AFP and GAPDH (as a control) was measured by western blot in HepG2 and SMMC7721 cells treated with icaritin at different concentrations for 20 h. b The mRNA expression of AFP was measured by qRT-PCR in HepG2 and SMMC7721 cells treated with icaritin. Results are representative of three independent experiments, and values are the mean ± S.E. *, p < 0.05; **, p < 0.01. The full-length images for blots in Fig. 1a were presented in Supplementary Fig. 4