Aplicação da tecnologia de DNA Barcode em espécies vegetais aprovadas pela ANVISA e comercializadas no Brasil e elaboração de metodologia para certificação de fitoterápicos

• Ano de defesa: 2015
• Autor(a) principal: Rafael Melo Palhares
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais; UFMG
• Palavras-chave em Português: Genética; Medicamentos fitoterápicos; Plantas medicinais; Barcode de DNA
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/BUBD-9WMRYA

Medicinal plants are recognized as essential to the completion of human health, as well as potential sources for new medicines. The use of medicinal plants and herbal medicines has increased in recent decades, and in some countries up to 90% of the population uses this class of drug. The authenticity and quality of these products is a real problem legally, economically, for populational health and biodiversity conservation. To ensure the effectiveness and safety of this pharmaceutical area, specific laws, which define the legal concepts for these products, and certain quality parameters have been established in Brazil and worldwide. Some of these parameters are the identification of plant species and checking for the presence, purity and concentration of chemical compounds related to the effectiveness of the drug. The correct identification of the vegetable raw material used for the production of herbal medicine is a challenge and the use of incorrect species may pose a risk to human health. Currently this step is done by botanical methods of identification and, in many cases it is difficult or even impossible to be made, depending on the level of processing of the raw material, the marketed plant parts, or even due to phenotypic variations present in some taxa. In contrast, the molecular identification of species in products using the DNA barcode technology is growing in the world. Applying specific DNA sequences, this technique has been used to catalog all the species of living beings on the planet. Its use to the identification of human consumer products is becoming increasingly common and efficient. This thesis focuses on the use of this technique to identify the species of vegetable raw material used in Brazil and in the world to human health. In addition, a correlation between the identification of plant species and chemical analysis for verification of presence and content of the active ingredients in the samples was performed. Briefly, in two chapters we have demonstrated that there is in Brazil trade of wrong species, different from those described in the sale, potentially threatened and even with no records effectiveness and safety. We also demonstrated that even in the correct species, chemical standards might be below the minimum required to achieve the expected results of the treatment. With these results, and with the worldwide trend, we conclude that the addition of a molecular identification step to herbal medicine production process will add improvement in the quality of these products, and contribute to biodiversity conservation by inhibiting the use of incorrect species.