Garnish your lunch with parsley and dill, it can save you from cancer

Compounds extracted from parsley and dill were found to work against tumours.

Green, leafy vegetables are nature’s gift to humankind. They fight so many diseases and keep you strong. Now, it has been found that parsley and dill also help in keeping cancer at bay.

Scientist from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), the ND Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry (RAS), the Institute of Developmental Biology (RAS) and the Institute of Cell Biophysics (RAS) proposed an efficient approach to a novel agents with anticancer activity. A synthesis of these compounds is based on compounds extracted from parsley and dill seeds.

Parsley is native to the Mediterranean, specially southern Italy, Tunisia and Algeria. (Shutterstock)

Researcher Alexander Kiselev said that they developed a simple method of producing glaziovianin A and its structural analogs, which inhibit the growth of human tumour cells, using feasible building blocks from nature and added that evaluation of these novel agents in vivo using validated sea urchin embryo assays yielded several promising candidates selectively affecting tubulin dynamics.

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The new method is cheaper than the existing ones because it involves cheap widespread materials and also reduces the number of steps in its synthesis and the list of catalysts involved.

Dill is a popular culinary herb in Russia, eastern Europe, Scandinavia and Finland. (Shutterstock)

In addition, the team synthesized a number of structural analogs of glaziovianin A in order to find new antimitotics.

The use of sea urchin embryos was another innovation offered by the team of scientists. The cells of these sea creature embryos divide rapidly in the early stages of development, simulating the way a tumour grows. When the antimitotics were added to the sea urchins’ substratum, they started to rotate, making it easy for the researchers to evaluate the effect of new drugs and their side effects.

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The results have been published in the Journal of Natural Products.