Evaluation of compounds with antioxidant activity in Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast cells

Abstract

Antioxidants are compounds that remove free-radicals or minimize their availability to generate oxidative stress. There are many methods to determine antioxidant capacity, but microbiological assays, using mainly eukaryotic cells, have shown similar results to man. The purpose of this work was to evaluate, through biological tests, the antioxidant capacity of L- ascorbic acid, vitamin E (alpha-tocoferol) and the flavonoids hesperidin, naringin, naringenin, quercetin, rutin and sukuranetin. The study was carried out on eukaryotic cells of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae treated with the above mentioned antioxidants in the presence of the stressing agent apomorphine. The results obtained showed that rutin, hesperidin, sakuranetin, quercetin and naringin were the most effective/potent antioxidant compounds followed by naringenin and a-tocopherol. Vitamin C and a mixture of vitamins C and E did not show antioxidant activity against apomorphine in the performed conditions of this work.