Cytotoxic and Antioxidant Activities of Two Species of Ginger Extracts

Abstract

Ginger or Khing (Thailand), a plant that belongs to the family Zingiberaceae, is one of
the herbs commonly used in Thai traditional medical formulas. From selective interviews
with Thai folk doctors and review Thai traditional medicine textbooks found that the word
ginger was classified in two terms, Khing and Khing-Haeng. Folk doctors described that
Khing-Haeng is more pungent than Khing but Khing-Haeng is becoming extinct. Thus,
nowadays they used Khing instead Khing- Haeng. Khing is identified as Zingiber officinale
and Khing-Haeng as Zingiber ligulatum. Thus, the objectives of this research are the
investigation and comparing biological activities, using in vitro cytotoxicity against lung
cancer cell lines (COR-L23) and antioxidant activity. Only ethanolic extracts of Zingiber
officinale and Zingiber ligulatum showed similar antioxidant activity with EC50 value of
15.10 ± 2.50 and 15.89 ± 2.92 μg/ml, respectively. For cytotoxic activity, only the ethanolic
extract of Zingiber officinale showed activity against COR-L23 with IC50 value of 7.90 ±
1.90 μg/ml but Zingiber ligulatum showed less activity (IC50 =42.27 ± 2.28 μg/ml). These
results revealed that Zingiber officinale possessed high cytotoxic activity against lung cancer
cells and confirmed using Zingiber officinale replace Zingiber ligulatum which nearly
disappear .