One pot environmental friendly synthesis of gold nanoparticles using Punica Granatum Juice: A novel antioxidant agent for future dermatological and cosmetic applications.

HYPOTHESIS: The interesting properties of Gold Nanoparticles (AuNPs) make them attractive for different application fields such as cosmetology, medicine and clinical nanotechnologies. In this work a fast, easy and eco-friendly method for the AuNPs synthesis is proposed by using the Punica Granatum Juice (PGJ) with potential dermatological and cosmetic applications. The AuNPs antioxidant activity, due to the presence of phenols from the juice, and their use as booster for improving the Sun Protection Factor (SPF) in commercial sunscreen formulations, are thus expounded.

EXPERIMENTS: By using appropriate amounts of PGJ and HAuCl4 , under mild work conditions, AuNPs with a mean size of 100 ± 40 nm are observed and carefully characterized. Solution pH, temperature, and volume were also changed for optimizing the AuNPs formation and features. The antioxidant activity was studied, by evaluating the AuNP ability of scavenging the radical 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazylhydrate (DPPH). This finding was confirmed performing special experiments focused on the reaction between AuNPs and H2 O2 , by using suitable probes, such as 4-thiothymidine (S4 TdR) and Cytochrome-c (Cyt-c). The SPF value was also calculated.

FINDINGS: The synthetized AuNPs showed a surface plasmon in visible range at 577 nm and resulted stable for long time in aqueous medium, also changing the pH values in the range 2-12. The studied antioxidant activity, confirmed also by performing special experiments with suitable probes, demonstrated the high performance of AuNPs. The AuNP photostability under sun irradiation is also shown. The calculated SPF values were in the range 3-18, related to AuNPs concentration in the range 1.80 × 10-12 -1.00 × 10-11  M. The same AuNPs concentrations were used for cellular experiments. Indeed, since the AuNPs-PGJ mediated will be potentially introduced by dermal contact, dermal fibroblasts (Human Dermal Fibroblasts, HDF) and Human Microvascular Endothelial Cells (HMVEC) were used to evaluate the possible effects of these nanoparticles as a preliminary step. The results indicated that an AuNP concentrations in the range 1.80 × 10-12 -3.60 × 10-12  M could be adopted since they do not appeared cyctotoxic.