Ricerc@Sapienza

Alkaloids have always attracted scientific interest due to either their positive or negative effects on human beings. This review aims to summarize their antioxidant effects by both classical in vitro scavenging assay and at the cellular level. Since most in vitro studies used the DPPH (2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl) radical scavenging assay, the results from those studies are summed up in the first part of the article.

Several acellular methods, defined as oxidative potential (OP) assays, have been developed to assess the particulate matter (PM) oxidative capacity and they are considered as predictors of the ability of dust to generate oxidative stress in living organisms. There is no agreement regarding the most representative assay to measure the OP of PM (Ayres et al., 2008), but methods mostly used on the PM filter extracts are the dithiothreitol (DTT; Cho et al., 2005), the 2?,7?-dichlorofluorescin (DCFH; Hung et al., 2001) and the ascorbic acid (AA; Stoeger et al., 2008) assays.