Avaliação do caráter oxidante da violaceína

Violacein is a violet pigment isolated from many gram-negative bacteria, especially from Chromobacterium violaceum, a betaproteobacterium found in the Amazon River in Brazil. It has potential medical applications as an antibacterial, fungicide, anti-tryptanocidal, anti-ulcerogenic and anti-cancer drug, among others. Furthermore, its pro-oxidant activity has been suggested, but only in two specific tumor lineages. Thus, in the present study, the prooxidant effects of violacein were investigated in both normal and tumor cells, seeking to evaluate the cell responses. The evaluation of violacein cytotoxicity using the Trypan blue dye exclusion method indicated that CHO-K1 cells were more resistant than tumor HeLa cells. The oxidative stress induced by violacein was manifested as an increase in intracellular SOD activity in CHO-K1 and MRC-5 cells at a specific concentration range. Nevertheless, a decrease was detected specifically at 6-12 μM in HeLa and MRC-5 cells. Interestingly, the increase in SOD activity was not followed by a concomitant increase in catalase activity. Regarding to oxidative stress biomarkers, increased protein carbonylation and lipid hydroperoxides levels were detected respectively in CHO-K1 and MRC-5 cells treated with violacein at 1.5-3 μM and 3 μM, which may be an evidence that this compound causes oxidative stress specifically in these conditions. Additionally, it is believed that the decline in cell viability observed in MRC-5 cells and HeLa treated with violacein at 6-12 M is due to mechanisms not related to oxidative stress. Moreover, the results suggested that violacein might cause oxidative stress by increasing endogenous levels of O2 -, since the occurrence of an expressive change in SOD activity. In addition, in order to evaluate the antioxidant activity of violacein in the absence of a biological system, the total antioxidant and iron chelating activity were evaluated, so that antioxidant activities were detected at 30 and 60 μM of violacein. Altogether, the results indicate that although oxidative stress is triggered by incubation with violacein, it did not seem to be high enough to cause serious damage to cell biomolecules in HeLa cells and only at specific concentrations in CHOK-1 and MRC-5 cells. Comparing the results obtained in cell culture and the in vitro antioxidant activity evaluation, the results confirmed that violacein presents opposing oxidant features when in presence or absence of a biological system and the antioxidant character only occurs at high concentrations of the pigment.

Processo de difusão com agregação e reorganização espontânea em uma rede 2D

Difusive processes are extremely common in Nature. Many complex systems, such as microbial colonies, colloidal aggregates, difusion of fluids, and migration of populations, involve a large number of similar units that form fractal structures. A new model of difusive agregation was proposed recently by Filoche and Sapoval [68]. Based on their work, we develop a model called Difusion with Aggregation and Spontaneous Reorganization . This model consists of a set of particles with excluded volume interactions, which perform random walks on a square lattice. Initially, the lattice is occupied with a density p = N/L2 of particles occupying distinct, randomly chosen positions. One of the particles is selected at random as the active particle. This particle executes a random walk until it visits a site occupied by another particle, j. When this happens, the active particle is rejected back to its previous position (neighboring particle j), and a new active particle is selected at random from the set of N particles. Following an initial transient, the system attains a stationary regime. In this work we study the stationary regime, focusing on scaling properties of the particle distribution, as characterized by the pair correlation function ø(r). The latter is calculated by averaging over a long sequence of configurations generated in the stationary regime, using systems of size 50, 75, 100, 150, . . . , 700. The pair correlation function exhibits distinct behaviors in three diferent density ranges, which we term subcritical, critical, and supercritical. We show that in the subcritical regime, the particle distribution is characterized by a fractal dimension. We also analyze the decay of temporal correlations