Cytoprotective Activities of Water-Soluble Fullerenes in Zebrafish Models - Zebrafish: Methods for Assessing Drug Safety and Toxicity - page 249

Chapter 19

Cytoprotective Activities
of Water-Soluble Fullerenes
in Zebrafish Models*

Florian Beuerle 1 , Patrick Witte 1 , Uwe Hartnagel 1 , Russell Lebovitz 2 ,
Chuenlei Parng 3 , and Andreas Hirsch 1,2
1 The Institut fur Organische Chemie, Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg, Erlangen,
Germany
2 C-Sixty Inc., Houston, TX, USA
3 Phylonix, Cambridge, MA, USA

19.1 INTRODUCTION

Water-soluble fullerenes have been shown to be effective antioxidants against
reactive oxygen species (Chueh et al., 1999; Guldi and Asmus, 1999; Lin
et al., 1999, 2002, 2004; Puhaca, 1999; Bensasson et al., 2000; Lai et al., 2000;
Monti et al., 2000; Okuda et al., 2000; Huang et al., 2001a, 200b; Bosi et al., 2003;
Chen et al., 2004), including superoxide (Ali et al., 2004) and hydroxyl radical, and
appear to protect cells and tissues from oxidative injury associated with chemical
oxidants (Tsai et al., 1997), as well as UV, X-rays, and gamma irradiation (Straface
et al., 1999; Fumelli et al., 2000; Lin et al., 2001). Two different mechanisms
through which fullerenes provide this protection have been proposed. The first
involves covalent attachment of oxygen radicals to the fullerene carbon framework,
resulting in fullerene radical adducts (stoichiometric process), which could in
some cases after a sequence of subsequent addition and elimination steps convert
back to the parent water-soluble derivative (catalytic process). The second mech-
anism appears to involve a sequence of electron transfer processes between the

Reprintedwith permission: Beuerle F, Witte P, Hartnagel U, Lebovitz R, and ParngC (2007). Cytoprotective
activities of water-soluble fullerenes in zebrafish models. J Exp Nanosci 2(3): 147-170.