Investigação da atividade antifúngica do alfa-pineno sobre cepas de Rhizopus oryzea.

Abstract

Mucormycosis is an opportunistic fungal infection, with higher incidence in immunocompromised patients such as patients with cancer, those undergoing treatment with chemotherapy and cytotoxic drugs, steroids and other. This infection is caused mainly by fungi of genus Rhizopus spp. Mucor spp. and Absidia spp., but the genus Rhizopus spp. is involved in 70% of cases diagnosed. Mucormycosis may present as disseminated, cutaneous, pulmonary, gastrointestinal and rhino-orbitocerebral, the last one is the most common form of the disease. Moreover, since many patients who develop these aggressive fungal infections shows high mortality, there is a necessity for new therapeutic strategies aimed at introducing into new drugs, natural or synthetic, for the treatment of mucormycosis. Therefore, aim of this study was to investigate the antifungal activity of promising fitoconstituinte, the α-pinene. For this, we determined the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC), which was used strains of Rhizopus oryzae, belong to the Mycology Laboratory, Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB). The MIC was determined by the microdilution method at concentrations from 1024 to 0.5 µg/mL. The result indicates that alpha-pinene did not show significant inhibition of growth against strains of R. oryzae, because the MIC value was higher than the 1024μg/mL. Based on the above considerations, it is proposed that more detailed studies are performed using the α-pinene with their enantiomers separately in order to prove the antifungal activity of this monoterpene