Evaluating the antioxidant capacity of natural products: A review on chemical and cellular-based assays

Oxidative stress is associated with several pathologies like cardiovascular, neurodegenerative, cancer and even aging. It has been suggested that a diet rich in antioxidants would be beneficial to human health and a lot of interest is focused on the determination of antioxidant capacity of natural products. Different chemical methods have been developed including the popular ORAC that evaluates the potential of a sample as inhibitor of a target molecule oxidation. Chemical-based methods are useful for screening, they are low cost, high-throughput and yield an index value (expressed as equivalents of Trolox) that allows comparing and ordering different products. More recently, nanoparticles-based assays have been developed to sense the antioxidant power of natural products. However, the antioxidant capacity indexes obtained by chemical assays cannot extrapolate the performance of the sample in vivo. Considering that antioxidant action is not limited to scavenging free radicals but includes upregulation of antioxidant and detoxifying enzymes, modulation of redox cell signaling and gene expression, it is necessary to move to cellular assays in order to evaluate the potential antioxidant activity of a compound or extract. Animal models and human studies are more appropriate but also more expensive and time-consuming, making the cell culture assays very attractive as intermediate testing methods. Cellular antioxidant activity (CAA) assays, activation of redox transcription factors, inhibition of oxidases or activation of antioxidant enzymes are reviewed and compared with the classical in vitro chemical-based assays for evaluation of antioxidant capacity of natural products.

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► There is high interest on determination of antioxidant capacity of natural products.
► Several chemical in vitro methods should be used.
► Cellular antioxidant activity assays should also be performed.
► No strong correlation between chemical and cellular assays.