Cytogenetic, cytotoxic and GC-MS studies on concrete and absolute oils from Taif rose, Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Taif rose (Rosa damascena trigintipetala Dieck) is a sort of damask rose, which is considered as one of the most important economic products of Taif. In this study, the authors investigated the possible cytotoxic, genotoxic, antimutagenic and anticancer effect of concrete and absolute rose oils. The results showed that both concrete and absolute rose oils were cytotoxically and genotoxically safe at a dose of 10 μg/ml when tested on cultures of normal human blood lymphocytes. Also, the results showed significant antimutagenic activity at p < 0.001 for absolute rose oil at the same dose level when tested on cultures of normal human blood lymphocytes supplemented with 300 ng/ml mitomycin C (MMC). On the other hand, concrete and absolute oils exerted a cytotoxic activity against two kinds of human cancer cell lines: HepG2 and MCF7. Concrete oil showed cytotoxic activity against HepG2 and MCF7 with a half maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) of 16.28 and 18.09 μg/ml, respectively, whereas absolute rose oil showed its cytotoxic activity against HepG2 and MCF7 with an IC50 of 24.94 and 19.69, respectively. From this study, it is concluded that concrete and absolute rose oils are cytotoxically and genotoxically safe at a dose of 10 μg/ml when tested on cultures of normal human blood lymphocytes. In addition, absolute oil has an antimutagenic activity at the same dose. Further investigations are needed to study the activity of higher doses of both oils in vitro and in vivo in experimental animals in order to evaluate the capability of using these oils as therapeutic for treatment of some kinds of cancers.

Fig. 1

a Normal metaphase plate from human peripheral blood lymphocytes without any treatment. b and c are metaphase plates from treated human peripheral blood lymphocytes showing breaks (b), fragment (f), radial form (r), acentric fragment (af), minute (m), deletion (d) and complex rearrangement (cr). Human peripheral blood lymphocytes were separated and cultured in complete medium supplemented with phytohemagglutinin incubated at 37 °C for 72 h. Lymphocytes of each donor were divided into six culture tubes, the first one was left as control and while the other tubes were treated with 10 μg/ml rose concrete oil, 10 μg/ml rose absolute oil, 300 ng/ml mitomycin C (MMC), 10 μg/ml rose concrete oil + 300 ng/ml MMC and 10 μg/ml rose absolute oil + 300 ng/ml MMC, respectively. The cultures were treated with hypotonic solution at 37 °C for 30 min, and then they were centrifuged and the pellets were fixed with methanol glacial trice. The fixed cells were dropped on clean slides, dried, stained with 4 % Giemsa solution, and microscopically screened

Fig. 2

Cytotoxicity of concrete (a) and absolute (b) rose oils against liver carcinoma cell line (HepG2) and breast carcinoma cell line (MCF7) at different concentrations using Sulphorhodamine-B (SRB) assay. The horizontal axis corresponds to different concentrations of oil and the vertical axis corresponds to percent of survival fraction. SRB is a colorimetric assay estimating cell numbers indirectly by staining total cellular proteins with the dye. The optical density (OD) of each well was measured spectrophotometrically at 564 nm with an ELIZA microplate reader. The percentage of survival fraction was calculated according to the following equation: Survival fraction (%) = [OD of treated cell/OD of control cells] × 100