Natural deep eutectic solvents: cytotoxic profile.

Maan Hayyan,Ozair Mohd-Ali,Yves Paul Mbous,Zulhaziman Salleh,Won Fen Wong,Chung Yeng Looi,Adeeb Hayyan

doi:10.1186/s40064-016-2575-9

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the cytotoxic profiles of different ternary natural deep eutectic solvents (NADESs) containing water. For this purpose, five different NADESs were prepared using choline chloride as a salt, alongside five hydrogen bond donors (HBD) namely glucose, fructose, sucrose, glycerol, and malonic acid. Water was added as a tertiary component during the eutectics preparation, except for the malonic acid-based mixture. Coincidentally, the latter was found to be more toxic than any of the water-based NADESs. A trend was observed between the cellular requirements of cancer cells, the viscosity of the NADESs, and their cytotoxicity. This study also highlights the first time application of the conductor-like screening model for real solvent (COSMO-RS) software for the analysis of the cytotoxic mechanism of NADESs. COSMO-RS simulation of the interactions between NADESs and cellular membranes’ phospholipids suggested that NADESs strongly interacted with cell surfaces and that their accumulation and aggregation possibly defined their cytotoxicity. This reinforced the idea that careful selection of NADESs components is necessary, as it becomes evident that organic acids as HBD highly contribute to the increasing toxicity of these neoteric mixtures. Nevertheless, NADESs in general seem to possess relatively less acute toxicity profiles than their DESs parents. This opens the door for future large scale utilization of these mixtures.

Highlights

The use of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) has left in its wake countless considerations, most of which associated with safety and toxicity issues (Bushnell et al 2007)
This study showed that natural deep eutectic solvents (NADESs) are generally less toxic than deep eutectic solvents (DESs)
It emphasized the significant role of hydrogen bond donors (HBD) with regards to NADESs cytotoxic profiles

Summary

Introduction

The use of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) has left in its wake countless considerations, most of which associated with safety and toxicity issues (Bushnell et al 2007). ILs are characterized by a number of attractive properties such as high thermal stability, nonflammability, high solvability, chemical stability, low Hayyan et al SpringerPlus (2016) 5:913 aspects, they offer several other advantages, such as the low cost of their starting materials, ease of preparation, and no waste generation (Tang and Row 2013). As a result, they have been used in a wide number of applications such as extraction processes (Qi et al 2015), biotransformations (Wu et al 2014), nanoparticles assembly (Wagle et al 2014), preservation of biomolecules (Dai et al 2015), upstream and downstream biodiesel processing (Hayyan et al 2010, 2013a, 2014), electrodeposition (Ru et al 2015), and organic synthesis (Zhang et al 2012)

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