Banca de DEFESA: ELISÂNGELA XAVIER ANDRADE

WHAT'S IN THE BRAZIL NUT BARK TEA?

Bertholletia excelsa, medicinal plants and secondary metabolites.

Bertholletia excelsa, popularly known as brazil nut tree, has great importance in the economy of the Amazon region and for traditional communities, which use aqueous extracts of the urchins and the bark of the tree 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 specie. And this work aims to identify the main secondary metabolites present in the barks of the chestnut tree using the technique of ultra-performance liquid chromatography coupled with high-resolution mass spectrometry (UHPLC/HRMS2) due to its high efficiency and sensitivity, with extraction and detection of a wide range of metabolite polarity and to allow a relative quantification between substances. For this study it was used bark samples from 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 boiled water, then freezed, lyophilized and analyzed by UHPLC/HRMS2. The mass spectra were searched in ten databases via Compound Discoverer software, through which 1.798 analytes were identified. Among the most abundant are the: ellagic acid, gallic acid, epigallocatechin, linoleic acid, octadecadienoic acid, α-eleostearic acid, 4-acetamidobutanoic acid, pyrogallol and choline, which are related to the biological activities described by the popular use.