Ylang Ylang Essential Oil in Malignant and Non-Malignant Cells: Comparative Mitophagy-Related Transcriptional Responses

Background: Mitophagy is a mitochondrial quality-control pathway whose contribution to cancer stress tolerance may vary by cellular context. For essential oils, mechanistic interpretation is often limited by compositional variability and the limited number of studies addressing malignant and non-malignant comparisons under matched exposure conditions. Methods: Ylang Ylang essential oil (YY EO) was characterized by GC-MS-FID. Lung cancer cells (A549) and a salivary gland carcinoma model (HTB-41), together with non-malignant lung-related cells (BEAS-2B, MRC-5), were exposed to YY EO. Functional outcomes were assessed by WST-1 and LDH assays. Mitophagy-related and mitochondrial quality-control-associated genes were quantified by RT-qPCR (2−ΔΔCt). Results: GC-MS-FID identified a terpenoid-rich mixture (99.31%), with germacrene D and β-caryophyllene among the major constituents. YY EO was associated with dose- and cell-type-dependent functional responses, with malignant cells showing reductions in WST-1 signal and stronger LDH-associated responses under the tested conditions, while non-malignant cells showed less pronounced functional changes. Transcriptional responses were context-dependent, with differential changes in mitophagy-related genes across cell lines. Conclusions: These findings provide comparative evidence of greater functional sensitivity in malignant cells, alongside cell-context-dependent mitophagy-related transcriptional responses. These observations are hypothesis-generating and remain limited to functional readouts and mRNA-level data. Within these limits, the present study provides a composition-anchored comparative dataset that may support future mechanistic studies in this area.