Natural antioxidants derived from plants exert various physiological effects, including antitumor effects. However, the molecular mechanisms of each natural antioxidant have not yet been fully elucidated. Identifying the targets of natural antioxidants with antitumor properties in vitro is costly and time-consuming, and the results thus obtained may not reliably reflect in vivo conditions. Therefore, to enhance understanding regarding the antitumor effects of natural antioxidants, we focused on DNA, one of the targets of anticancer drugs, and evaluated whether antioxidants, e.g., sulforaphane, resveratrol, quercetin, kaempferol, and genistein, which exert antitumor effects, induce DNA damage using gene-knockout cell lines derived from human Nalm-6 and HeLa cells pretreated with the DNA-dependent protein kinase inhibitor NU7026. Our results suggested that sulforaphane induces single-strand breaks or DNA strand crosslinks and that quercetin induces double-strand breaks. In contrast, resveratrol showed the ability to exert cytotoxic effects other than DNA damage. Our results also suggested that kaempferol and genistein induce DNA damage via unknown mechanisms. Taken together, the use of this evaluation system facilitates the analysis of the cytotoxic mechanisms of natural antioxidants.
Keywords: DNA double-strand break; DNA single-strand break; antitumor effect; natural antioxidant; non-homologous end-joining.