South Indian Journal of Biological Sciences

Nusrath Noorudheen ¹, Dhanya K. Chandrasekharan ¹

Affiliations
1 Department of Microbiology, St Mary’s College, Thrissur, Kerala – 680020, IN

Abstract

Pesticides include all classes of chemicals used for killing or repelling insects, fungi, vegetation, and rodents. Eventhough they are in a way beneficial since they can protect against forest and farm crop losses aid in more efficient food production and are instrumental in controlling insect‐vector borne diseases, their increased use has several drawbacks including health effects, loss of bio‐diversity and irreversible changes and degradation of natural ecosystems. In the present study, the nutraceutical, Phyllanthus emblica are evaluated for their ability to protect against Captan, a fungicide, induced genotoxicity and oxidative stress, in vivo. Chronic exposure to pesticides adversely affects various organ systems and theses effects have been attributed to increased oxidative stress and cellular DNA damage. Oxidative stress induced by Captan was studied in vivo by analyzing the extent of lipid peroxidation and levels of GSH in the gill tissue of fish (guppy) grown in water containing Captan in presence or absence of gooseberry extracts. The genotoxicity of Captan and the genoprotective action of gooseberry was studied using comet assay on gill tissue of fish (guppy) grown in water containing Captan in presence or absence of the extracts. The results clearly indicated that the extracts could mitigate captan induced oxidative stress and genotoxicity which could be due to the efficient free radical scavenging activity by the extracts.

Keywords

Pesticides, Fungicide, Genotoxicity, Oxidative Stress, Lipid Peroxidation, GSH.

Full Text