Abstract
Carqueja (Baccharis crispa Spreng.) has been primarily used as a medicinal plant around the world. Commercially, the essential oil content of carqueja leaves is the most valuable crop productivity variable. We evaluated the effect of irrigation management in different growing seasons on the essential oil content of carqueja leaves using gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry. The experiment was conducted in a greenhouse located in Southern Brazil, where the crop was cultivated for two years in different growing seasons under six irrigation regimes: 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%, 125%, and 150% of the reference crop evapotranspiration (T25, T50, T75, T100, T125, and T150, respectively). A seasonal pattern was observed in the number of metabolites of sesquiterpenes and phenolics in the essential oil extracted from the biomass; this outcome was correlated with irrigation regimes and air temperature. Principal component and hierarchical cluster analyses were used to discriminate the influence of abiotic conditions on secondary metabolite profiles. Spathulenol was the most abundant compound in the essential oils (95.43%) collected during the summer (December–March) season during the third harvest (H3) at T150. The essential oil content was 8.84% ± 0.05% and 10.52% ± 0.10% in summer and winter (June–September), respectively, with T100 at 45 and 46 days after planting.
Highlights
Baccharis species have been extensively used for industrial purposes as well as in food and beverages, mainly in South America and Japan [1]
Optimal irrigation management requires working knowledge. To provide such knowledge on the quality of B. crispa, grown in tropical environment for medicinal purposes to farmers and companies, we aimed to identify all the essential oil components (EOC) in carqueja using gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC–MS), as well as to compare the essential oil yields and dry matter production of B. crispa from a wide range of irrigation regimes with different crop growing seasons
We found an abundance of sesquiterpenes in the leaf oils extracted via hydrodistillation from a Baccharis species
Summary
Baccharis species have been extensively used for industrial purposes as well as in food and beverages, mainly in South America and Japan [1]. The literature shows that Baccharis species have been useful for human health and in preventing heart disease and cancer, treating rheumatism and rheumatoid arthritis, and to ameliorate gastrointestinal, hepatic, and renal diseases, in addition to inflammatory disorders [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. B. crispa is popularly recognized as carqueja in Brazil, and grows spontaneously in a wide range of soils and ecosystems in different Brazilian bioclimatic zones [18] It is currently used as a medicinal plant and requires strict irrigation management to ensure a high yield and optimal quality in commercial farming systems [12]
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