Abstract
Plants are considered to be an excellent source of new compounds with antibiotic activity. Carlina acaulis L. is a medicinal plant whose essential oil (EO) is mainly characterized by the polyacetylene carlina oxide, which has antimicrobial properties. The aim of this study was to evaluate the antimicrobial and antifungal activities of C. acaulis EO, carlina oxide, and nanoemulsion (NE) containing the EO. The EO was obtained through plant roots hydrodistillation, and carlina oxide was purified from it through silica gel column chromatography. The NE containing C. acaulis EO was prepared with the high-pressure homogenization method, and the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) was determined against several bacterial and fungal strains for all the C. acaulis-derived products. The latter resulted active versus all the screened Gram-positive bacterial strains and also on all the fungal strains with low MIC values. For yeast, the EO and carlina oxide showed good MIC values. The EO-NE demonstrated a better activity than the pure EO on all the tested bacterial and fungal strains. The results suggest that C. acaulis-derived products could be potential candidates for the development of natural antibacterial and antifungal agents.
Highlights
One of the major concerns of today’s world is the increasing antibiotic resistance that is threatening our ability to combat infectious diseases, and, for this reason, new antibiotic agents are urgently needed
There is the urgent need for alternatives to the commonly used antibiotics and, nowadays, the interest of research is increasingly focusing on botanical products, essential oil (EO)
The use of these botanical products is characterized by sustainability and low toxicity, but it is accompanied by limitations due to their physicochemical properties [35]
Summary
One of the major concerns of today’s world is the increasing antibiotic resistance that is threatening our ability to combat infectious diseases, and, for this reason, new antibiotic agents are urgently needed. In this scenario, plants represent a good source of bioactive compounds due to the production of secondary metabolites that act as defensive molecules against microbes [1]. Several antibiotic agents have been obtained from different plant species, and the majority of the antibiotics available are represented by compounds of a natural origin [2,3]. Carlina acaulis L., belonging to the Asteraceae family, is a plant with proven biological importance. From the roots of this plant, an essential oil (EO) can be obtained whose distinctive feature is the presence of the polyacetylene carlina oxide as the main constituent (> 95%)
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