Quimiotaxonomia dos gêneros Aspidosperma, Kopsia, Tabernaemontana e Alstonia (apocynaceae) a partir de alcaloides utilizando descritores moleculares e mapas auto-organizáveis

Abstract

Secondary metabolites produced by plants play an important issue related to the permanence of species in the environment. Among the most common types, alkaloids are nitrogen compounds that have several biological activities and are used as a marker in studies of chemosystematic. This paper aims at describing chemotaxonomy studies with alkaloids among four genera: Aspidosperma, Kopsia, Tabernaemontana and Alstonia (Apocynnaceae), using molecular descriptors and artificial neural networks. In order to do so, a database was built with 723 drowned and subscribed alkaloids with their respective botanical occurrence within SISTEMAT X which made possible to obtain more detailed information in every molecule as oxidation number and structural properties. The compounds were used to generate molecular descriptors and classify the botanical ocurrences using Self Organizing Maps (SOMs). Chemical pattern regarding alkaloids from the three genera used in this work corroborate with previous published studies using other taxonomic markers (morphological and molecular). Forthcoming studies, increasing our databank, can help to understand, more deeply, the structural patterns of compounds from Apocynaceae supporting in the bioprospection of natural products of this family.