Antimicrobial Activity and Rates of Tannins in Stryphnodendron adstringens Mart.Accessions Collected in the Brazilian Cerrado

Inner bark extracts of Stryphnodendron adstringens, a leguminous tree species known as Barbatimão, are often incorporated to phytotherapic formulations due to their antimicrobial and healing activities. In this study, extracts from S. adstringens accessions collected in 12 distinct locations were investigated in order to determine the rates of tannins in inner barks and to validate S. adstringens antibacterial and antifungal effectiveness. Yields of tannins were quantified by colorimetric assay following methodology described in the Brazilian Pharmacopoeia and the antimicrobial activity was determined by microdilution technique proposed by the National Committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards using S. adstringens hydroalcoholic and aqueous extracts and semi-purified fractions. Investigated extracts did not present significant antibacterial activity though aqueous extracts exhibited antifungal effect against both Trichophyton rubrum mutant and clinical strains (MIC 156 μg/mL). A positive correlation between tannin concentration and antifungal activity was observed and the accessions collected in Delfinópolis (MG) were considered elite.

Kaphta:Text mining web tool to extract information on the anticancer activity of polyphenols

In this paper,we describe the application of Kaphta architecture,a resource for text mining of the anticancer activity of polyphenols.The anticancer activity of these compounds against different types of cancer has been widely reported in the literature and they are one of the most promising molecules for the development of anticancer drugs.The architecture,which comprises four sequential and well-defined steps,uses a hybrid approach composed of a dictionary,rules and machine learning to identify abstracts containing sentences with associations between polyphenol,cancer and gene entities.The application of the architecture on 23826 PubMed abstracts generated a knowledge base of indexed abstracts with 172169 sentences containing,polyphenol-cancer and polyphenol-gene associations.A Web tool was implemented that allowed the user to search for information on 2006 polyphenols,240 cancers and 3121 genes entities,and 11750 polyphenol-cancer and 9160 polyphenol-gene associations indexed in the knowledge base.A ranking algorithm calculates scores for each indexed abstract considering the number and type of sentences with entities and rules recognized.A test with users demonstrated that the visualization resources on the web tool contributes to the understanding of the association between polyphenols,genes and cancers,in comparison with the PubMed Tool.The Kaphta architecture and web tool permits to extract knowledge on the anticancer activity of polyphenols and can thus contribute to the exploration of these molecules in the development of anticancer therapies.