Therapeutic opportunities of surface-active ionic liquids: a case study on acetylcholinesterase, citrate synthase and HeLa cell lines

Abstract

In concurrence with the pursuit of clean and green medium, recent years have witnessed an unprecedented rise in the usage of ionic liquids (ILs). However, studies on the effect of ILs on various biological pathways are sparse. A series of ILs with dodecyl and tetradecyl chains with three different classes of head groups were synthesized and their activities on neuronal enzyme acetylcholinesterase (AChE) and mitochondrial enzyme Citrate Synthase (CS) were investigated. To verify the bio-compatibility of the investigated ILs, the ecotoxicity behaviour was checked on Escherichia coli E149 (EC) and Staphylococcus aureus S244 (SA) bacterial strains along with their cytotoxicity properties on HEK and HeLa cells. Pyridinium based ILs were found to exhibit the highest inhibition effect on AChE; meanwhile, morpholinium based ILs did not show any significant impact. In the case of CS too, pyridinium based systems showed maximum inhibition in vitro, in comparison with both the morpholinium and imidazolium ILs. In addition, all the ILs were also found to exhibit significant antioxidant activities. The results were comparable with the independently estimated integrity of mitochondria extracted from HeLa cells. In silico docking and atomistic molecular dynamics simulation studies validated all the experimental results. The observations have significant and diverse implications with respect to the use of ILs as a drug delivery media on healthy as well as the persons affected with cancer, neurological and/or respiratory disorder.