The olive tree (Olea europaea, Oleaceae) has historically provided huge economic and nutritional benefits to the Mediterranean basin. In fact, olive leaf extracts have also been used by native people of this area in folk medicine to treat fever and other diseases such as malaria. Recently, several studies have focused on the extraction of high-added-value compounds from olive leaves. However, no previous studies have been developed in order to evaluate the activity of these extracts against Acanthamoeba. In the present work, olive leaf extracts from five different Tunisian varieties of olive trees (Chemlali Tataouine, Zarrazi, Toffehi, Dhokkar, and Limouni) were obtained by using three different solvents, and their activity against the trophozoite stage of Acanthamoeba castellanii Neff was screened. The IC50/96 h (50% parasite growth inhibition) was chosen as the appropriate and comparable data to give as previously described. It could be observed that the amoebicidal activity was dose dependent. Trophozoite growth was inhibited by all the tested extracts with IC50 ranging from 8.234 ± 1.703 μg/ml for the alcoholic mixture of the Dhokkar extract to 33.661 ± 1.398 μg/ml for the methanolic extract of the Toffehi variety. The activity in fact was affected especially by the tested variety and not by the solvent extraction, the Dhokkar variety being the most active one as mentioned above.
Khantouche et al.: Nutritional antioxidative Globularia alypum LThis investigation dealt with the determination of the content of phenolic compounds, flavonoids, anthocyanins, tannins and in vitro antioxidant activity of the ethanol extract of the leaves of Globularia alypum. The physicochemical characteristics of the leaf powder of Globularia alypum such as metabolic energy, mineral element and organic matter were evaluated. Fatty acid content was determined using gas chromatography. This investigation appeared to be the first to report the analysis of the leaf powder, ethanol extracts of Globularia alypum L. In this study dried extracts, ashes, proteins, crude fat fibre, percent sugar, metabolic energy and minerals such as calcium, sodium and potassium were quantified. The ethanol extract of the leaf had shown antioxidant activity and a high percent of polyphenols and flavonoids (180.5± 2.1 mg Globularia alypum extracts/g and 20.7 mg QE/g). A high correlation was observed between the total phenolic and flavonoid content and the antioxidant activity (R 2 = 0.943 and R 2 = 0.910, respectively). Gas chromatographic analysis showed the presence of 13 acids in this extract, mainly linoleic acid (30.1 %) and linolenic acid (24.8 %). The leaf powder of this plant is considered as a source of mineral elements even though, it is full of fatty acids in comparison to proteins and sugar. The ethanol extract of the leaf of Globularia alypum could be considered as a source of polyphenols and as an extract with potential antioxidant activity.
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