VIABILITY OF VERO E6 CELLS EXPOSED TO THE Bothrops leucurus SNAKE CRUDE VENOM

Primary and continuous cell culture systems are a good in vitro alternative for the quantitative assessment of snake venom toxicity. There are still few studies evaluating the cellular response against Bothrops leucurus venom (BlV). This study aimed to evaluate the cytotoxic effect of crude BlV on culture of VERO E6 cells. Neutral Red incorporation (NR) and 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyl-tetrazolium bromide (MTT) tests were performed for viable cells, and Trypan Blue (TB) dye exclusion test was performed for non-viable cells. The differences between the groups were evaluated by ANOVA-One-Way and Dunnet through the program Graph Pad 5.0 with significance of 5%. The 50% cytotoxic concentration (CC50) of BlV was 7.86 μg/mL. There was a trend of dose-dependent reduction on cell viability in all assays evaluated. However, MTT and NR tests were more sensitive for the evaluation of BlV cytotoxicity on the VERO E6 cell line.