Atividade antimicrobiana da jurema preta (mimosa tenuiflora): revisão de literatura.

Abstract

The use of plants for medicinal purposes for the treatment, cure and prevention of diseases is one of the oldest forms of medicinal practice in humanity. Due to this tradition, many studies are being carried out on the effect that plants have on the body. The interest in researching antimicrobial activities of medicinal plants is due to the appearance of strains resistant to almost all drugs available on the market. The present work aimed to present, in the form of a literature review, the properties of Caatinga plants, especially Jurema Preta (Mimosa tenuiflora) and their antimicrobial action. A bibliographic search was carried out between the years 2000 to 2021 on caatinga plants for medicinal purposes was carried out with a focus on Jurema Preta, (Mimosa tenuiflora) through a bibliographic search of articles from specialized journals in Scielo databases (Scientific Electronic Library Online), Portal de Periódicos CAPES, PUBMED, Semantic Scholar and Google Scholar. The search was carried out for articles published in Portuguese and English, using the following keywords: Caatinga/Caatinga, Semi-arid/ Semi-arid, Antimicrobial activity/ Antimicrobial activity, Jurema preto/ Jurema black and small ruminants / Small ruminants, aiming to identify experimental and exploratory studies that approach Jurema Preta, with a description of its properties, therapeutic purposes and forms of use. The selection of works took place from june to november 2021. Initially, all articles that had in the title, subtitle or abstract the terms: medicinal plants, phytotherapics, phytotherapy, medicinal herbs, Jurema Preta, Mimosa tenuiflora, antimicrobial action of plants of the caatinga, antimicrobial action of Jurema Preta and of Jurema preta against the microorganisms that cause mastitis. In view of the above, studies that did not fit the objective proposed in this work or that were repeated in the scientific portals used were excluded. Among these, we found three repeated works and 8 publications that did not follow the proposed objective. Thus, among these, thirteen articles were considered for analysis, and in these, the abstracts were initially read to see the adequacy to the research objective, and later, if they were adequate, a textual reading was performed. Works that did not fit the objective proposed in this work or that presented information repeated by some authors, as well as translations of the original studies into other languages, were excluded. The present study allowed to evidence the medicinal properties of the Caatinga plants, mainly due to the antimicrobial power derived from secondary metabolites such as terpineols, alkaloids and phenolic compounds. Furthermore, Jurema Preta (Mimosa tenuiflora) is efficient against several pathogenic microorganisms, mainly against gram-positive bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus, Micrococcus luteus and Streptococcus ssp. and fungi (Microsporum canis, Gypseum, Thrichophyton mentagrophytes, rubus, Chaetomium indicum and Candida ssp. However, this survey showed that there are still few reports on the isolation of active principles, making clear the need for further studies on the subject.