Cordia verbenacea DC.: Application of chemometric techniques for chemical evaluation of populational, circadian and seasonal differences

• Grant number: 16/10519-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: August 01, 2016
• End date: November 01, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Pharmacy - Pharmacognosy
• Principal Investigator: André Gonzaga dos Santos
• Grantee: Juhan Augusto Scardelato Pereira
• Supervisor: Hector Casimiro Goicoechea
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Farmacêuticas (FCFAR). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Araraquara. Araraquara , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Universidad Nacional del Litoral (UNL), Argentina
• Associated to the scholarship: 13/24298-9 - Evaluation of secondary metabolism variability in Cordia verbenacea DC, BP.DR

Abstract

Cordia verbenacea DC. ("erva-baleeira") belongs to the Boraginaceae family, which contains approximately 100 genera with over 2000 species distributed across the world. This species is widely used to treat various topical inflammatory processes. It was used by Aché® laboratories for the development of the anti-inflammatory herbal medicine Acheflan®. The relevance of understanding the variability of the metabolic process in medicinal plants is not limited to ecophysiological approaches. Thus, the variation of the concentration of active compounds (secondary metabolites) in the herbal medicines or herbal traditional preparations can result in the loss of safety and /or efficacy. In this context, chemometrics is a part of the chemistry that makes use of statistical and mathematical tools for obtaining information on the chemical from multivariate data. In this work, we propose to compare by multivariate analysis using chemometric tools the chemical profiles of secondary metabolites of various specimens of C. verbenacea, assessing the populational, circadian and seasonal chemical differences.