Anais do Simpósio Latino Americano de Ciências de Alimentos
Proceedings of 14 SLACA - Latin American Symposium on Food Science

Geopropolis is a mixture of earth or clay in which Melipona bees add their respective propolis. The present work aimed to characterize a hydroalcoholic extract of geopropolis (EHGP) from the bee Melipona subnitida (Jandaíra) by means of phytochemical prospecting, in vitro evaluation of antimicrobial activity using the agar diffusion method and determination of antioxidant activity. The phytochemical prospection revealed the presence of alkaloids, free anthraquinonic compounds, triterpenes, flavonoids, tannins, reducing sugars and polyphenols. These bioactive compounds may have been responsible for the antimicrobial activity, demonstrated in gram-positive bacteria Staphylococcus aureus (ATCC 25923) and gram-negative Escherichia coli (ATCC - 11301). The data indicate an important potential of geopropolis in pharmaceutical manipulations. Staphylococcus aureus is one of the most common staphylococcal bacteria and often causes skin infections, which can cause pneumonia, heart valve infections and bone infections, this shows the importance of finding bioactives that have antimicrobial activity for this bactéria. Escherichia coli showed moderate sensitivity to the concentration of extract used. This behavior was expected, since the antibacterial activity of propolis is more effective on gram-positive bacteria. The content of total phenols found in the investigated samples also meets the minimum requirement of the Ministry of Agriculture, which is at least 0.5% for commercial propolis extracts. A positive correlation was also found between antioxidant activity and the variables total phenols and total flavonoids , that is, as the contents increased in the samples, there was a percentage increase in the antioxidant activity. From these results it was possible to conclude that the hydroalcoholic extract of geopropolis from the bee Melipona subnitida, from the region of Mossoró/RN, showed promising potential as a chemical agent for bacterial control.