Essential oil composition of Lithraea molleoides (Vell.) Engler (Anacardiaceae), a controversial medicinal, edible, and allergenic species from South America

Authors

Manuel Minteguiaga¹ , Eduardo Dellacassa¹ , Cecilia Rodríguez-Rego¹ , Enzo Fagúndez¹ , Fernando Ferreira¹ , Marta Pavarino² , Patrizia Rubiolo² , Cecilia Cagliero² , Barbara Sgorbini²

1. University of the Republic
2. University of Turin

Conference / event

53rd International Symposium on Essential Oils, September 2023 (Milazzo, Italy)

Poster summary

Lithraea molleoides (Vell.) Engler (Anacardiaceae) is an evergreen tree species native from South America, considered as a medicinal and edible plant in Argentina. However, in the neighbor country (Uruguay) this plant is not recognized as such, and it is considered highly allergenic, with frequently reported cases of contact dermatitis occurring in sensibilized people. Not volatile alk(en)yl-catechols have been pointed out as responsible of such contact dermatitis. Moreover, an orally transmitted tradition in Uruguay indicates that such affections are also possible when the people just approach to the trees, without being necessary the contact (that is, an eventual airborne allergy). This suggests the intervention of volatile allergens in the process. Here we analyze chemically the volatile oil of L. molleoides as a first step to validate such traditional information, finding many components cited previously as contact allergy elicitors, most of them having both enantiomers as revealed by enantioselective GC-MS.

Keywords

Lithraea molleoides, Essential Oils, Medicinal/Edible/Allergenic Plants, GC-MS, Chiral Selectors

Research areas

Plant Sciences, Chemistry

References

No data provided

Funding

No data provided

Supplemental files

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Additional information

Competing interests

No competing interests were disclosed.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated during and / or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Creative Commons license

Copyright © 2024 Minteguiaga et al. This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.