2.6. Artemia salina lethality test
The brine shrimp larva Artemia salina is highly sensitive
to a variety of chemical substances and therefore used for
the determination of cytotoxicity. The method described
by Hossain et al[14] was adopted with slight modifications.
The non-esterified seed oils were dissolved in DMSO and
made up with natural sea water to 5 mL in four different
concentrations (1 000, 200, 20 and 2 毺g/mL). The test was
carried out in replicate and a control was included with
only DMSO in seawater. Eggs were sown in natural sea water
and nauplii were obtained after 48 h and inoculated with
the test samples. After one hour and 20 h of incubation at
room temperature in the light, the number of survivors in
each test tube was calculated for acute and lethal toxicity
respectively. Cyclophosphamide was used as a standard
cytotoxic test drug. Using the dose response curve, the LC50
was determined on graphpad prism-3 software by applying
a non-linear regression analysis.