In vivo gastroprotective effect and biological potentialities of six Tunisian medicinal plants using multivariate data treatment

Abstract

Six Tunisian medicinal plants were screened for their phenolic pools, antioxidant activities as well as for their anti-inflammatory and gastro-protective effects. A significant variability in phenolic composition and antioxidant capacities between species were observed. Myrtus communis L. exhibited the highest phenolic contents and composition as well as the best potential antioxidant capacities as rescued by the lowest IC₅₀ and EC₅₀ values. On other hand, the common species excepting Juniperus phoenicea L. showed a noteworthy to moderate anti-inflammatory activity inhibiting NO^• release with an IC₅₀ values ranging from 26 to 240 µg/mL. In turn, in vivo gastro-protective effect following HCl/EtOH induced ulcer models displayed that M. communis extract had an important inhibition of gastric lesions correlated to high healing and protection percentages. The visualized data were treated by PCA and Bi-plot analysis which highlighted a positive correlation among phenolic pools and antioxidant activities particularly in M. communis. Besides, statistic clustering allowed us to detect a strong contribution of phenol and flavonoid pools with anti-inflammatory and anti-ulcerogenic effects. Overall, the results obtained in this work indicated that the studied species, particularly Myrtus communis, represent a valuable source of natural agents beneficial for human health in particular for inflammation and gastric diseases.

Keywords:

• Antioxidant activity
• anti-inflammatory activity
• gastroprotective effect
• phenolic compounds
• Tunisian medicinal plants

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Tunisian Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research (LR15CBBC06).