Abstract
While carbon-based materials have spearheaded numerous breakthroughs in biomedicine, they also have procreated many logical concerns on their overall toxicity. Carbon dots (CDs) as a respectively new member have been extensively explored in nucleus directed delivery and bioimaging due to their intrinsic fluorescence properties coupled with their small size and surface properties. Although various in vitro/in vivo studies have shown that CDs are mostly biocompatible, sufficient information is lacking regarding genotoxicity of them and underlying mechanisms. This study aims to analyze the real-time cytotoxicity of super tiny CDs (2.05 ± 0.22 nm) on human breast cancer cells (MCF7) and human primary dermal fibroblast cell cultures (HDFa) by xCELLigence analysis system for further evaluating their genotoxicity and clastogenicity to evaluate the anti-tumor potential of CDs on breast adenocarcinoma. As combined with flow cytometry studies, comet assay and cytokinesis-block micronucleus assay suggest that the CDs can penetrate to the cell nuclei, interact with the genetic material, and explode DNA damage and G0/G1 phase arrest in cancer cells even at very low concentrations (0.025 ppm) which provide a strong foundation for the design of potentially promising CD-based functional nanomaterials for DNA-damage induced treatment in cancer therapy.
Highlights
While carbon-based materials have spearheaded numerous breakthroughs in biomedicine, they have procreated many logical concerns on their overall toxicity
The HR-Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) image shows that the Carbon dots (CDs) displayed a highly crystalline structure with a 0.21 nm lattice spacing that is attributed to the graphitic carbon[84]
A systematic toxicity analysis of CDs produced from the extract of N. oleander via thermal synthesis method was conducted
Summary
While carbon-based materials have spearheaded numerous breakthroughs in biomedicine, they have procreated many logical concerns on their overall toxicity. CDs have become interesting because of their unique physical and chemical properties such as thermal and electrical conductivity, high mechanical strength together with their unique optic and fluorescence features[14,15,16]. They have been used in bio-imaging, drug delivery, nucleus targeting, and labeling, photodynamic therapy, optoelectronics, solar cells, photocatalyst design, photodetectors, and many other biological and engineering fields[17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26]. Our group lately presented the synthesis routes for Oleander based CDs using both thermal and microwave-based synthesis m ethodologies[69,70] while we have shown that extract type (water or ethanol extraction) is one of the important parameters where the highest fluorescence and the lowest size was observed using water-based Oleander extract as a carbon source for CD synthesis
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