DNA-damage and cell cycle arrest initiated anti-cancer potency of super tiny carbon dots on MCF7 cell line

While carbon-based materials have spearheaded numerous breakthroughs in biomedicine, they also have procreated many logical concerns on their overall toxicity. Carbon dots (CDs) as a respectively new member have been extensively explored in nucleus directed delivery and bioimaging due to their intrinsic fluorescence properties coupled with their small size and surface properties. Although various in vitro/in vivo studies have shown that CDs are mostly biocompatible, sufficient information is lacking regarding genotoxicity of them and underlying mechanisms. This study aims to analyze the real-time cytotoxicity of super tiny CDs (2.05 ± 0.22 nm) on human breast cancer cells (MCF7) and human primary dermal fibroblast cell cultures (HDFa) by xCELLigence analysis system for further evaluating their genotoxicity and clastogenicity to evaluate the anti-tumor potential of CDs on breast adenocarcinoma. As combined with flow cytometry studies, comet assay and cytokinesis-block micronucleus assay suggest that the CDs can penetrate to the cell nuclei, interact with the genetic material, and explode DNA damage and G0/G1 phase arrest in cancer cells even at very low concentrations (0.025 ppm) which provide a strong foundation for the design of potentially promising CD-based functional nanomaterials for DNA-damage induced treatment in cancer therapy.