The sampling of biological material was carried outaccording to the Helsinki Declaration and under the super-vision of experts. Approximately 2–3 mL of blood wascollected from both the control and exposed groups. Bloodsamples were collected in EDTA-coated vacutainers, BDserum vacutainers (BD Biosciences, Becton Drive FranklinLakes, New Jersey, USA), tubes containing Trizol and lysisbuffer to perform various analyses. Samples kept in icewere immediately transported to the biochemical labora-tory of the Aligarh Muslim University of Aligarh. Plasmaand serum separation was carried out on the same dayand stored. All the samples were stored at −80◦C untilprocessing was started.