Antioxidant and DNA Damaging Protection of Some Herbal Supplements: In vitro & In silico Approach

Botanical dietary supplements, also known as herbal supplements, are products derived from plants. They can be used to enrich diets, treat diseases, and promote overall health. The current study aims to evaluate the antioxidant activity as well as DNA damage protection capacity for three types of supplements that were supplied commercially and tried to test their total antioxidant activity (TAC), and the ability to directly protect human genomic DNA from damage was tested for each supplement, an In-silico docking study of the supplements into the DNA was performed. The TAC values for the supplements were 3.196, 0.005, and 679.2 µg of Vitamin C equivalent /mg of the Artemisinin, Hesperidin, and Theaflavin supplements respectively. Also, Artemisinin shows the highest DNA protection capacity from damaging factors with a 100% protection percentage, while Theaflavin and Hesperidin had less ability to protect the DNA from damaging factors with 77.7% and 48.2% respectively. the docking study showed the ability of each supplement to bind with the human DNA. That means the different herbal supplements show different antioxidant activity as well as different DNA protection capacities from damaging factors and that may be related to the active compounds in each supplement or the way of extraction and purification.