Ganesh Chandra Jagetia, Shaival K Rao
Environmental science is moving through a dreaded and drastic crisis. Tinospora cordifolia or giloe is used in Ayurvedic system of medicine for the treatment of many diseases. Our earlier studies have shown that giloe exerts cytotoxic effect in vitro and in vivo, which stimulated us to understand the mechanism of cell death is HeLa cells receving various concentrations of giloe. Therefore, induction of molecular DNA damage by different concentrations of dichloromethane extract of giloe, Tinospora cordifolia (TCE) was studied in HeLa cells by alkaline comet assay and the DNA damage induced by TCE has been expressed as olive tail moment (OTM). Incubation of HeLa cells with TCE for 4 h caused greater DNA damage as indicated by increased OTM when compared with 2 h treatment and therefore 4 h exposure time was considered as an optimum duration for TCE treatment. Exposure of HeLa cells to 0, 1, 2, 4, 6 or 8 μg/ml TCE resulted in a concentration dependent elevation in the DNA damage and the lowest concentration of 1 μg/ ml TCE increased the baseline DNA damage approximately by 10 folds, whereas 8 μg/ml TCE, the highest concentration tested caused an approximate 68 folds elevation in the DNA damage, when compared with the untreated control.
