Sustainable use of the Brazilian biodiversity: chemical and pharmacological prospection on higher plants

Abstract

The apparent incompatibility between chemical and pharmacological investigation of a plant species can be solved with the strong determination of dealing rationally with the problem. The research groups on Natural Products Chemistry from the IQ-Araraquara-Unesp, on Pharmacology, from IB-Unicamp and 1B-Botucatu-Unesp and on Biological Sciences, from FCF-Araraquara-Unesp have started a collaboration 2 years ago, and have already produced a significative amount of work, with relevant results on the investigation of plant species with anti-ulcer, anti-oxidant, analgesic, anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial activities. hese results arose from an approach that includes ethnobotanical and ethnopharmacological research, pharmacological, microbiological and mutagenicity assays with crude extracts or infusions, chemical screening to determine new chemical classes of compounds, isolation and structural determination of compounds and use the compounds or enriched fractions to determine the possible pharmacological mechanisms of the action involved with the detected properties. This project deals with the continuation of the integrated chemical and pharmacological investigation of plant extracts, this time investigating species that com poses the bioma Cerrado of the State São Paulo, comparatively to the Bioma Cerrado of the State of Tocantins, which it is also under our investigation. To perform the phytochemical step we intend to use the usual chromatographic techniques, mainly those for the analysis of polar substances (GPC, XAD2, DCCC, HSCC, HPLC, etc), and to determine the structure of the isolated compounds through spectrometric methods (NMR, IR, UV, and MS). To evaluate the biological activities, the possibility of toxicicity and genotoxicity effects of each species will be determined. Simultaneously, we will evaluate the activity of the extracts and pure substances (ar enriched fractions) against different experimental models of peptic ulcer disease which operate by distinct mechanism of ulcerogenesis in man... (AU)