Tinospora cordifolia, a safety evaluation

Tinospora cordifolia is one of the indispensable medicinal plants used in veterinary folk medicine/Ayurvedic system of medicine for the treatment of diverse diseases and recommended for improving the immune system by means of body resistance. In the current study, we evaluated the genotoxic risk of the aqueous extract of T. cordifolia (TC) in a battery of four different genotoxicity tests viz., Ames, in vitro chromosome aberration (CA), rodent bone marrow micronucleus (MN), and Comet assay. Experimental results confirmed that in Ames test up to 5000 μg/plate of TC did not exhibit any mutagenic effect in Salmonella typhimurium mutant strains (TA97a, TA98, TA100, TA102, and TA1535). In CA assay, TC was not clastogenic to human peripheral blood lymphocytes up to a concentration of 3000 μg/ml. In MN and Comet assays, TC was pre-treated for 7 days at three dose levels (150, 200 and 250 mg/kg body weight) orally to male Balb/c mice. The results showed that TC treatment did not display clastogenicity and DNA damaging effect in bone marrow erythrocytes and peripheral blood lymphocytes respectively.