Antifungical and immunomodulatory activities from Caesalpinia pulcherrima extracts

Abstract

Caesalpinia pulcherrima is a species widely used in folk medicine for various diseases such as fever, infections and mouth ulcers. In addition, scientific studies have reported medicinal properties such as antitumor, antiviral, antibacterial and antifungal. Therefore, the objective of this work was to evaluate if organic extracts obtained from leaves of C. pulcherrima have medicinal properties. Three organic extracts were obtained (hexane, ethyl acetate and ethanol) from the leaves collected from the Soxhlet equipment. The characterization was made by GC-MS and UPLC-MS and biological properties as antioxidant (AAT, DPPH, ABTS and lipid peroxidation radicals), antimicrobial, cytotoxicity and immunostimulant (using splenocytes of mice Balb/c) were investigated. Results showed several classes of secondary metabolites, but the ethyl acetate showed more phenols and flavonoids than the other extracts. Extracts showed good results in antioxidant tests, especially the ethyl acetate, but did not show antibacterial activity. The fungal evaluation showed high antifungal properties, especially the hexanic and the ethyl acetate against Candida tropicalis, Aspergillus terreu, Candida krusei and Cryptococcus neoformans strains. Cytotoxicity evaluation showed that under 25 μg/mL are the safety doses that can be used for in vitro tests, besides that, extracts were able to induce cytokine stimulation. These results show that the ethyl acetate extract was the best formulation found in this study to be used against fungal infections, for antioxidant proposes and for promote immunostimulation.