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Pinolenic acid (PNA), a naturally-occurring polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA), is found mainly in pine seeds. Although many studies have demonstrated beneficial effects of pine seed oil, there are no reports of the biological effects of PNA on cancer metastasis. The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of PNA on human breast cancer MDA-MB-231 cell proliferation and metastasis in vitro . We found that PNA did not affect cell viability and cell-matrix adhesion, but it inhibited cell metastasis by suppressing cell invasiveness and motility. Suppression could in part be associated with the modification of the n −6 PUFA composition of cells by PNA which significantly decreased the percentage of arachidonic acid (AA) in phospholipids from 12.6% to 4.9%. The lower AA content of the cancer cells might result in less synthesis of prostaglandin E 2 (PGE 2 ), and subsequent down-regulation of inducible cyclooxygenase (COX-2) expression. Thus, PNA represents a potential anti-cancer agent.

A generalized projective implicitization theorem is presented that can be used to solve the implicitization of rational parametric curves and surfaces in an affine space. The Groebner bases technique is used to implement the algorithm. The algorithm has the advantages that it can handle base points in a parametrization, and no extra factors will be introduced into an implicit equation. The complexity of the algorithm in terms of the degrees of the polynomials in the Groebner basis is better than the existing method