Composição química, atividade citotóxica, acaricida e antioxidante do óleo essencial das flores de Caesalpinia echinata (Pau-brasil).

Abstract

Belonging to the family Fabaceae, Caesalpinia echinata is a tree endemic to Brazil, popularly known as pau-brasil. It was widely explored because of the quality of its wood and the produc-tion of a red pigment and much coveted in colonial times for dyeing fabrics and due to predatory extractivism, it was almost extinct. Currently, wood is much sought after for the manufacture of bows for violins for its ideal stiffness and density. The scarcity of chemical and biological studies of different parts of the plant motivated the chemical composition of the essential oil of the flowers as well as the evaluation of the acaricide, cytotoxicity properties against saline ar-temia and antioxidant. The flowers of C. echinata were collected on the campus of the Federal Rural University of Pernambuco. The essential oil (EO) was extracted from the hydrodistilla-tion technique by a modified Clevenger type apparatus. The chemical composition of the oil was determined by gas chromatography coupled to a mass spectrometer. Residual contact was the method selected to evaluate the acaricide action on Tetranychus urticae and the biological model selected for cytotoxicity evaluation was That of A. salina. The EO of the flowers pre-sented monoterpenes as the main chemical class. The main compounds identified were linalool (32.33%), Z-jasmona (14.94%) and [beta]-E-ocimene (10.44%). The essential oil for the control of T. urticae presented a LC50 = 290.15 uL/mL. The EO revealed an antioxidant capacity for the free radical DPPH˙ estimated at EC50 = 364.10 ug/mL, while for the free radical ABTS˙+ was EC50 = 280.50 ug/mL. The oil exhibited a LC50 = 97.41ug/mL for the toxicity test against A. salina. This study showed that the essential oil of C. echinata flowers has acaricide, antioxidant and cytotoxic biological property against A. salina.