Background: In the last years, many efforts have been made to find colchicine derivatives with reduced toxicity. Additionally, the deregulation of amino acid uptake by cancer cells provides an opportunity to improve anticancer drug effectiveness. Objective: To design new colchicine derivatives with reduced cytotoxicity and enhanced selectivity by means of introducing aminoacyl groups. Method: 34 colchicine analogues bearing L- and D-amino acid pendants were synthetized and characterized by NMR, IR and MS techniques. Cytotoxicity and antimitotic properties were assessed by spectrophotometry and cell cycle assays. Oncogene downregulation was studied by RTqPCR whereas in vivo studies were performed in SCID mice. Results: Compounds exhibit high antiproliferative activities at the nanomolar level while being, in general, less cytotoxic than colchicine. Most compounds inhibit the polymerization of tubulin in a way similar to colchicine itself, with L-amino acid derivatives being the most active in the inhibition of tubulin polymerization. All selected compounds caused cell cycle arrest at the G2/M phase when tested at 1 μM. More specifically, Boc-L-proline derivative 6 arrested half of the population and showed one of the highest Selectivity Indexes. Derivatives 1 (Boc-glycine), 27 (D-leucine) and 31 (Boc-glycine-glycine) proved fairly active in downregulating the expression of the c-Myc, hTERT and VEGF oncogenes, with compound 6 (Boc-L-proline) having the highest activity. This compound was shown to exert a potent anti-tumor effect when administered intraperitoneally (LD50 > 100 mg/kg for 6, compared with 2.5 mg/kg for colchicine). Conclusion: Compound 6 offers an opportunity to be used in cancer therapy with less toxicity problems than colchicine.

Several colchicine analogues in which the N-acetyl residue has been replaced by haloacetyl, cyclohexylacetyl, phenylacetyl and various aroyl moieties have been synthesized. The cytotoxic activities of the synthesized compounds have been measured on three tumor cell lines (HT-29, MCF-7 and A549) and on one non-tumor cell line (HEK-293). These compounds exhibit high antiproliferative activities at the nanomolar level, in many cases with a higher potency than colchicine itself. Some of the compounds, particularly the haloacetyl derivatives, inhibit the polymerization of tubulin in a similar manner as colchicine. As regards the cell cycle, the most active compounds are the chlorobenzoyl and bromobenzoyl derivatives, which cause cell cycle arrest at the G2/M phase when tested at 20 nM, and the bromoacetyl derivative, which arrests the cell cycle at 15 nM. In addition, these colchicine derivatives have shown fairly active downregulating the expression of the c-Myc, hTERT and VEGF genes, as well as VEGF protein secretion, at very low concentrations.

Several colchicine analogues in which the N-acetyl residue has been replaced by aliphatic, straight-chain acyl moieties, have been synthesized. These compounds show high cytotoxic activity at the nanomolar level against the tumoral cell lines HT-29, MCF-7 and A549. Some of them exhibit activities in the picomolar range against the HT-29 line and are thus two to three orders of magnitude more cytotoxic than colchicine. In this specific cell line, the activities were found to be closely related to the length of the acyl carbon chain, an increase in the latter giving rise to an increase in the cytotoxicity with a maximum in the range of 10-12 carbon atoms, followed by a decrease in activity with still longer chains. Some of the compounds inhibit microtubule assembly and induce the formation of abnormal polymers and present in most cases better apparent affinity constants than colchicine. In addition, at IC50 concentrations the analogues block the cell cycle of A549 cells in the G2/M phase. Molecular docking studies suggest that, while interactions of the colchicine analogues with the colchicine binding site at fi-tubulin are still present, the increase in the acyl chain length leads to the progressive development of new interactions, not present in colchicine itself, with the neighborin alpha-tubulin subunit. Indeed, sufficiently long acyl chains span the intradimer interface and contact with a hydrophobic groove in a-tubulin. It is worth noting that some of the compounds show cytotoxicity at concentrations three orders of magnitude lower than colchicine. Their pharmacological use in cancer therapy could possibly be performed with lower dosages and be thus endowed with less acute toxicity problems than in the case of colchicine. (C) 2016 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

A method based on micellar liquid chromatography has been developed to simultaneously monitor four pesticides largely post-harvest applied to citrus: thiabendazole, pyrimethanil, o-phenylphenol and imazalil. Water samples were filtered and directly injected without other treatment, thus avoiding extraction steps. The composition of the mobile phase was optimized using a chemometrical approach to achieve and excellent resolution to 0.07 mol/L SDS/5%, V/V 1-pentanol buffered at pH 3. Mobile phase run through a C18 column at 1 mL/min at room temperature. The detection was performing by UV–Visible absorbance using a wavelength program: 0–10 min, 305 nm (for thiabendazole); 10–12; 265 nm (for pyrimethanil) and 12–18, 220 nm (o-phenylphenol and imazalil). The developed method was validated following the guidelines of the US Environmental Protection Agency in terms of: quantitation range, (0.5–4 to 15 μg/mL), linearity (r2 > 0.9995), sensitivity (LOD, 0.18–1.4 μg/mL), precision (< 9.2%), trueness (93.9%–103.7%), and ruggedness (< 9.9%). It was found that the fungicides remain up to eight days in surface water at outdoor conditions. The method was used to screen the presence of the analytes in several waste water samples, and was proved to be useful in routine analysis.