Effects of Physiological Saline Solution Treated by Ar Dielectric Barrier Discharge on Proliferation of Jurkat Cell

Recently, applications of discharge plasma to medical fields have been actively studied by many research groups [1]. The authors have conducted fundamental study aiming to apply the discharge plasma to a therapy for autoimmune disease [2]. The present study investigated the effect of the physiological saline solution treated by argon dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) on Jurkat cells. The plasma-treated saline (PTS) solution was prepared by exposing physiological saline solution to the DBD generated by feeding 1-L/min argon for 15 minutes. Jurkat (RCB0806) cells were exposed to the PTS for 30 minutes and then incubated for 30 hours. The number of viable and non-viable cells were evaluated at the several time points of incubation using Trypan blue staining method. In the case of Jurkat cells unexposed to any solutions and plasma, the viable cell number was increased favorably during the 30-hours incubation while the non-viable cells were maintained almost constant in small numbers. These results also led to the favorable increase of the total cell number. In contrast, in the case of Jurkat cells exposed to the PTS, the number of viable and non-viable cells were respectively decreased and increased with incubation time, resulted in the slight decrease in the total cell number. From these results, it was found that the PTS inhibits the cellular proliferation of Jurkat cells and promotes the cell death. We are now conducting apoptosis detections by a flow cytometry to investigate further the cell death of Jurkat cells.