Toxicity of selected plant volatiles in microbial and mammalian short-term assays

In this study, several short-term microbial and mammalian in vitro assays were used to evaluate cytotoxicity and genotoxicity of four plant volatiles showing antifungal activity: cinnamaldehyde, carvacrol, thymol and S(+)-carvone. All inhibited viability and proliferation of Hep-2 cells in a dose-dependent manner. IC₅₀ ranged from 0.3 mm (cinnamaldehyde) to 0.7 mm (thymol) in viability tests and from 0.2 mm (carvacrol) to 0.9 mm (carvone) in the proliferation test. The morphological analysis suggested an involvement of apoptosis in the cases of carvone, carvacrol and cinnamaldehyde. At non-toxic doses, carvacrol and thymol increased the number of revertants in the Ames test by 1.5–1.7 times, regardless of metabolic activation. In the SOS-chromotest, none of the four plant volatiles caused DNA damage at non-toxic doses. In the DNA repair test, a marked dose-dependent differential toxicity was observed with carvone and, to a lesser extent, with cinnamaldehyde, while with thymol and carvacrol, this effect was less pronounced. In conclusion, the considered in vitro cytotoxicity assays have shown to be sensitive enough to highlight a variety of toxic effects at the cellular level, which can be rather different between chemically closely related compounds, such as isomers.