Commercial turmeric (powder form), was procured from a general supermarket in Seoul, Korea. All the chemicals used in the study, unless specified as otherwise, were of analytical grade. Millipore water was used for all experiments. 1 g/L concentrations of turmeric were used to prepare the curcumin solutions. The sample we denote as ‘turmeric powder’ in the manuscript was prepared by suspending 1 g of the commercial turmeric powder in 1L of sterile distilled water. This suspension was used in the experiments reported in the study under the term, turmeric powder. No commercial curcumin was used in this study, all the curcumin reported herein were extracted from turmeric. Curcumin@EtOH was prepared by suspending 1 g/L of turmeric in ethanol with sonication using a Bandelin Sonopuls HD 2200 (GmbH & Co. KG) probe ultrasonicator with 200 W ultrasonic power and a frequency of 20 kHz for 30 s. 1 g/L turmeric in sterile water was subjected to sonication using the same instrument for 5 min following our previously published methodology (Bhawana et al., 2011 and Gopal et al., 2015). The prepared extractions were characterized for the presence of curcumin, curcumin using a Nanodrop ND-1000 v 3.3.1 spectrophotometer (Nanodrop Technologies, Inc., Wilmington, USA). The absorbance was scanned from 220 to 700 nm.