The chemical composition on fingerprint of Glandora diffusa and its biological properties

Glandora diffusa (Lag.) D.C. Thomas is a medicinal species widely consumed as herbal tea. Despite being commercialized by several herbs distributors, the genuineness of the marketed product is unknown. Among secondary metabolites with proven taxonomic interest, the phenolics profile was herein used as “fingerprint” of three commercial G. diffusa samples. Furthermore, the knowledge on the composition of this species was extended and its amino acids, fatty acids, sterols and triterpenes profiles were studied for the first time. The phenolics profile was characterized by HPLC-DAD. All other metabolites were determined by GC-MS. Despite similar qualitative profiles, significant quantitative differences were observed among the three samples. Their potential as antioxidant and anti-Alzheimer and cytotoxicity was evaluated and relationship between chemical composition and activities was considered. Ethanolic extracts showed a potent dose-dependent response against DPPH, a mild inhibitory effect on both acetylcholinesterase (AChE) and butyrylcholinesterase (BuChE) and to be toxic to both human colorectal (Caco-2) and gastric adenocarcinoma (AGS) cells only for high concentrations. This work covers interdisciplinary aspects in the pharmaceutical and biomedical sciences, by focusing on metabolic profiling and quality assurance of a medicinal species used in folk medicine. The results improve the knowledge on G. diffusa and encourage its use, not only as herbal tea, as it is traditionally consumed, but also in pharmaceutical preparations, ethanol being a cheap and feasible solvent to recover its bioactive components.