Triclosan: Electrochemistry, Spontaneous Degradation and Effects on Double-Stranded DNA

Abstract

Triclosan (TCS) is an antiseptic agent widely used mainly in personal care products and an important contaminant, which degrades in the environment causing toxicity on health, including negative effects on DNA. In this context, an electrochemical investigation of TCS in aqueous solution was studied by voltammetric techniques. The TCS underwent irreversible oxidation in a pH-dependent process, leading to the formation of two reversibly oxidized and pH-dependent oxidation products. An oxidation mechanism for TCS and its oxidation products in neutral aqueous medium was proposed. Besides that, the TCS spontaneously degraded into supporting eletrolytes with 3.4 ≤ pH ≤ 12.04 over the incubation time and the degraded TCS in solution was detected by electrochemical and spectrophotometric techniques. A higher degradation of TCS was observed in alkaline medium. In addition, the interaction in situ of this anti-microbial with DNA was investigated using dsDNA incubated solutions and dsDNA electrochemical bisosensor, by voltammetry. TCS and degraded TCS interacted with dsDNA causing the condensation of the double helix structure, release of guanine (by TCS and dedraded TCS) and adenine (by degraded TCS) bases from dsDNA and a possible intercalation of degraded TCS in the polynucleotide chain. No dsDNA oxidative damage was detected.