Figure 3.

Tributyltin(IV) butyrate (BT2) induces cytotoxic effects in colon cancer cells: (a) MTT assay was used to measure cell viability in two colon cancer cell lines (HCT116 and CaCo-2), as reported in Materials and Methods (Section 3). Cells were incubated for 48 h in the presence of the conjugates (BT2 and BT1) and the corresponding parent compounds (TBT and TMT) at the indicated concentrations. The effects of butyric acid (BTA) were also evaluated. The results reported in the histograms are representative of three separate experiments: (*) p-value < 0.05; (***) p-value < 0.001 compared with untreated cells; N.S. = not significant; (b) Morphological analysis of HCT116 cells treated with 0.5 μM BT2 and TBT for 48 h. The cells were visualized under a light microscope at 200× magnification and the pictures were acquired by IM50 Leica Software (Leika Microsystems, Wetzlar, Germany).