Antioxidant capacities and cytotoxic properties of some natural phenolic compounds in different cell lines

Plant phenolic compounds are important constituents of the human diet and in recent years attention has been drawn to beneficial properties of plants and its phenolic compounds. They exhibit a wide range of biolog- ical effects, including antioxidant, antiplatelet, anti-inflammatory and an- ticancer activities. Curcumin, resveratrol and rosmarinic acid are phenolic compounds which are known as antioxidants and commonly used for the preventation and treatment of oxidative stress related diseases such as car- diovascular and neurodegenerative disorders and cancer. In this study, we determined the antioxidant capacities of these phenolic compounds by the trolox equivalent antioxidant capacity (TEAC) assay and their cytotoxicity by neutral red uptake (NRU) assay in healthy cell line (i.e., chinese ham- ster ovary (CHO)), and two tumor cell lines (human breast carcinoma (BT- 474) and human epithelial adenocarcinoma (HeLa)). Our results showed that resveratrol and rosmarinic acid have significantly more antioxidant capacity than trolox whereas curcumin showed less antioxidant capacity compared to trolox. In healty CHO cell line, curcumin, resveratrol and rosmarinic acid showed significantly cytotoxic activity, but in cancer cell lines such as HeLa and BT-474, all of the tested compounds have shown different profile. It seems to be not cytotoxic to HeLa and BT-474 cancer cell lines assuming that its usage in these cancer types are not beneficial.