Prospecção fitoquímica de Chloris gayana Kunth (Poaceae).

Abstract

The increasing use of plants for medicinal purposes has aroused interest in the knowledge of the chemical composition of the plant kingdom. Natural products are known to be sources of drugs, and yet are still little explored. Phytochemical research aims to understand or evaluate the presence of chemical constituents in plant species. Where no studies on the chemical species of interest, the phytochemical analysis can identify the relevant groups of secondary metabolites. Therefore, the aim of this study was to phytochemical screening of Chloris gayana Kunth (Poaceae), a non-endemic native plant of Brazil, popularly known as crow's foot and that has no chemical study described in the literature. The plant was collected at the site Campo Comprido, municipality of Cuité-PB, submitted and drying at room temperature, pulverized in a mechanical grinder and extracted with 96% ethanol, resulting in crude ethanol extract (EEB). This was subjected to partitioning with solvents in increasing polarity gradient, providing the following phases: hexane, chloroform and ethanol-water, respectively. To prospecting (screening) phytochemistry was adopted the methodology proposed by MATOS (2009) employing reagents specific for each chemical group. Steroids and triterpenes (Lieberman-Burchard), flavonoids (Shinoda; FeCl3;NaOH), tannins (FeCl3), alkaloids (Dragendorff; Bouchardat) and saponins (Foam Index) were searched. The results indicated in the chemical constitution of this species the presence of tannins, alkaloids, steroids, triterpenes and absence of saponins.