Heracleum maximum (HM), is a plant native to North America and is rich in a class of compounds called furanocoumarins. The stem and root of this plant are edible and have been used in traditional medicine for treating a variety of infectious diseases. Psoralea corylifolia (PC) is a plant native to India and is known to contain furanocoumarins. PC has been used in folklore medicine to treat vitiligo. Furanocoumarins are phototoxic and Artemia salina (brine shrimp) are very sensitive to phototoxic compounds. To assess HM and PC extracts for phototoxicity/toxicity, the seeds of these two plants were extracted with solvents of increasing polarity (hexane, ether, ethyl acetate and ethanol, respectively) using soxhlet extraction and subjected to brine shrimp bioassays. To see if the phototoxic extracts also correlated with higher melanogenetic properties, extracts from HM and PC were subjected to B16 murine melanoma cell bioassays. The results of these two bioassays will be presented.

Heracleum maximum and Psoralea corylifolia: Toxicity/phototoxicity evaluation

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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