Toxic potential and ethnobotanical indications of the essential oil of Protium heptaphyllum (Aubl.) Marchand
Traditional know, bioprospecting, cytotoxicity, genotoxicity, mutagenicity.
Volatile oils, also called essential oils, are considered natural concentrated extracts extracted from various parts of plants. The essential oil of Protium heptaphyllum (Aubl.) Marchand is well known and indicated in ethnobotanical studies for several diseases and with different forms of manipulation, without taking into account its toxicity. Popularly, in general, there is a belief that “if it is natural, it does not hurt”, however, several substances isolated from plants, extracts and oils with medicinal purposes may have cytotoxic or genotoxic activities. Carrying out toxicological evaluation tests is of paramount importance to confirm that the chemical compounds present in the species under study do not exert toxic activities that make their use for therapeutic purposes unfeasible. Thus, the present research has as main objective to evaluate the cytotoxic, mutagenic and genotoxic activity and the ethnobotanical indications of the essential oil of P. heptaphyllum in vitro, using roots of Allium cepa and cells of mammals of different lineages. To test the cytotoxic, genotoxic and mutagenic potential, P. heptaphyllum essential oil will be used at different concentrations against the A. cepa bioassay system, and the MTT method to evaluate cell viability in mammalian cells in different lineages. After exposure of A. cepa for 120 h to different concentrations of essential oil of P. heptaphyllum, it was possible to observe that the size of the roots showed significant differences between some of the treatments, indicating toxicity of the oil. The concentration of 1000, 250, 100 and 50 µg/mL differed significantly from the negative control (Distilled water with 2% Tween 80). There was no significant difference between the 500 µg/mL concentration and the negative control, indicating a low toxicity of the oil in this treatment. The analysis of the mutagenicity index showed that there was a significant difference between the concentration of 1000 µg/mL and the other concentrations, indicating that the essential oil had some mutagenic potential. The other results are under analysis.