THE USE OF CANTANHEIRA IN POPULAR MEDICINE: PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS OF ITS POTENTIALmass spectra; Chestnut tree; folk medicine
Bertholletia excelsa, popularly known as chestnut tree, has great importance in the economy of the Amazon region and for traditional communities. Traditional communities use this species in folk medicine as an infusion to treat diarrhea, menopause, anemia, diabetes, inflammation and as an antibiotic. However, there are still few chemical constituents described in the open literature on this species. And the research of this work aims to identify the main secondary metabolites present in Brazil nut using the technique of metabolomic analysis due to its high sensitivity. According to ethnobotany, the most used parts of B. excelsa are the urchins and the bark in the form of aqueous extracts. For this study we used bark samples from the trunk of three trees with breast diameters of 172.6; 156.0 and 69.8 cm, collected at the Embrapa Experimental Field in Porto Velho/RO. The samples were dried, ground and extracted by methanol, then concentrated, lyophilized and analyzed by ultra-performance liquid chromatography coupled with high-resolution mass spectrometry (UHPLC/HRMS2). The mass spectra were searched in 9 databases via Compound Discoverer software, through which 16,238 analytes were detected, from which 1.798 were identified.