Essential Oil’s Chemical Composition and Pharmacological Properties

Essential oil, sent by nature, is a complex mixture of volatile secondary metabolites. Its composition varies along with many parameters that can lead to misunderstanding of its wonderful pharmacological property. In fact, from post-harvest treatment to the compound’s identification through extraction approaches, the original chemotype of essential oils can be misdescribed. The pharmacological potentials of these oils are well known in the traditional system since time immemorial. Nowadays, some chemotypes of these oils had shown the effect against WHO’s top 10 killer diseases. But the misuses of these essential oils are in part due to the lack of robust and easy analysis strategy that can allow the quality of the essential oils

Antioxidant and Antifungal Activities of Cocoa Butter (Theobroma cacao), Essential Oil of Syzygium aromaticum and a Combination of Both Extracts against Three Dermatophytes

To contribute in the research of better drugs against dermatophytosis, we evaluated the antioxidant and antidermatophytic activities of cocoa butter, cloves essential oil, and a mixture of both extracts. The cocoa butter was obtained by boiling the cocoa paste. The essential oil extracted by hydrodistillation was chemically analysed by gas chromatography and gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry. The antioxidant activity was determined using the DPPH scavenging method, and  the antidermatophytic activity was evaluated using the agar dilution method. The essential oil, majoritary constituated by eugenol (87.62%), β-caryophyllene (5.88%), and β-bisabolene (4.41%), had an antiradical power (4.22 x 10-2) higher than that of BHT (4.00 x 10-3), like the cocoa butter and essential oil mixture (6.06 x 10-3). The essential oil was more active than the griseofulvin: it was fungicidal at 400 ppm against Trichophyton rubrum, and at 900 ppm against Microsporum gypseumand Trichophyton tonsurans. The cocoa butter activity was low, but the mixture with the essential oil had an important activity with inhibitory percentages of 78.69 %, 88.27 %, 91.20% against T. rubrum (at 400 ppm), T. tonsurans(at 900 ppm)and M. gypseum (at 900 ppm)respectively. Cloves essential oil and the mixture with cocoa butter can be used to formulate new drugs against dermatophytes.

A mathematical morphology approach to image formation and image restoration in scanning tunnelling and atomic force microscopies

In the nanometer resolution range, image formation in STM and AFM cannot be described by a convolution process but is essentially governed by the geometrical interaction between the specimen surface and the tip surface. This non-linear process can be simply described by a dilation of the surface profile by a three-dimensional structuring element which has the shape of the tip. Accordingly, the restoration procedure using these concepts consists in performing the erosion of the image by the same structuring element. A preliminary investigation of a possible blind restoration procedure (i.e. restoration without a very precise knowledge of the tip shape and without the need of using a known test object) is performed

Relationship between onchocerciasis and epilepsy : a meta-analysis

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