Abstract
The worldwide interest in the use of medicinal plants has been growing, and its beneficial effects being rediscovered for the development of new drugs. Based on their vast ethnopharmacological applications, which inspired current research in drug discovery, natural products can provide new and important leads against various pharmacological targets. This work pioneers an extensive and an updated literature review on the current state of research on Rosmarinus officinalis L., elucidating which compounds and biological activities are the most relevant. Therefore, a search was made in the databases PubMed, ScienceDirect and Web of Science with the terms ‘rosemary’, ‘Rosmarinus officinalis’, ‘rosmarinic acid’ ‘carnosol’ and ‘carnosic acid’, which included 286 articles published since 1990 about rosemary's pharmacological activities and their isolated compounds. According to these references, there has been an increasing interest in the therapeutic properties of this plant, regarding carnosic acid, carnosol, rosmarinic acid and the essential oil. The present manuscript provides an updated review upon the most reported activities on R. officinalis and its active constituents.
Highlights
Medicinal plants have been used worldwide by indigenous populations, playing an important role in the treatment of human and animal diseases [1]
The role of natural products on drug development has been increasing, when the bioactive compounds are directly used as therapeutic agents and when they are used as raw material for drug synthesis, or as a base model for new biologically active compounds [6,7]
Medicinal plants have an important role on pharmacological research and drug development, when the bioactive compounds are directly used as therapeutic agents, and when they are used as raw material for drug synthesis or as a base model for new lead compounds [6,7]
Summary
The extraction methods are applied to the plant most active portions (leaves, roots, stems or flowers), using selective solvents and standard procedures [42]. These techniques result in complex mixtures in liquid and semisolid forms or, after removal of the solvent, in the form of dry powder [43,44]. After analysis of the collected articles, the most used extraction methods to obtain the bioactive compounds from R. officinalis (see tables in Supplementary material) are maceration, hydrodistillation, distillation and Soxhlet by supercritical fluid extraction
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