Abstract
Vernonanthura polyanthes (Spreng.) A.J. Vega & Dematt. (Asteraceae), known as "assa-peixe", has been used in ethnomedicine for the treatment of various diseases such as bronchitis, pneumonia, hemoptysis, persistent cough, internal abscesses, gastric and kidney stone pain. Moreover, some studies demonstrated that species of Genus Vernonia present antifungal activity. Due to the biological relevance of this species, the aim of this study was to investigate the toxic, genotoxic, antigenotoxic and antifungal potential of V. polyanthes leaves aqueous extract in somatic cells of Drosophila melanogaster or against Candida spp. The aqueous extract of the plant showed no toxic, genotoxic and antigenotoxic activity in the experimental conditions tested using the wing somatic mutation and recombination test (SMART/wing). However, when the extract was associated with doxorubicin, used in this work as a positive control, the mutagenic potential of doxorubicin was enhanced, increasing the number of mutations in D. melanogaster somatic cells. In the other hand, no inhibitory activity against Candida spp. was observed for V. polyanthes leaves aqueous extract using agar-well diffusion assay. More studies are necessary to reveal the components present in the V. polyanthes leaves aqueous extract that could contribute to potentiate the doxorubicin genotoxicity.
Highlights
The survival curve showed that, under the conditions used in this work, V. polyanthes leaves aqueous extract presented no toxic activity in D. melanogaster larvae of both crosses, standard cross (ST) and high bioactivation (HB), when compared to the negative control
The V. polyanthes leaves aqueous extract genotoxicity was evaluated by ST and HB crosses, obtaining marker-heterozygous (MH) flies, presenting wild-type wings
V. polyanthes leaves aqueous extract presented no toxic, genotoxic or antigenotoxic activity in D. melanogaster somatic cells under the conditions used in this work
Summary
Rob. according to Vega and Dematteis (2010)] belongs to the plant family Asteraceae and is popularly known as “assa-peixe”. Metabolomic investigation corroborates the taxonomical classification, suggesting that Vernonia polyanthes should be considered as belonging to the Vernonanthura genus (Martucci et al, 2014). It has been reported that plants belonging to Vernonia Genus presents a plenty of bioactivities, including antiplasmodial, antileishmanial, antischistosomial, cytotoxicity, antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory (Toyang and Verpoorte, 2013). V. polyanthes is a plant common in Minas Gerais, São Paulo, Mato Grosso and Goiás, occurring primarily in Cerrado biome. This species is a shrub with oval leaves, rough and hairy spear-shaped. The white or pink inflorescences are arranged at the apices of the branches in small capitula (Alves and Neves, 2003)
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