Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento CientÃfico e TecnolÃgico

Orientador: Celso Costa Lopes / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia de Alimentos / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-03T21:15:39Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Santos_JacquelineFiuzados_M.pdf: 989559 bytes, checksum: d99881a8ced970d9dfeb94c9772270df (MD5) Previous issue date: 2004 / Mestrado

M.Tech .(Homoeopathy) / The aim of this study was to evaluate the growth rate of germinating Zea Mays seeds subject to the administration of homoeopathically potentised Carbo vegetabilis in the potencies 12CH, 13CH and 14CH. The purpose of the study is to help disprove the popular "placebo effect" explanation as to why homoeopathy works by showing that homoeopathic medicine can have a fundamental effect on a living organism and thereby lend credibility to homoeopathy as a science. This study is of value as previous botanical studies have not attempted to provide an explanation as to how homoeopathic potencies may be acting and have mostly merely demonstrated their effects on cleoptile growth. Six hundred Zea Mays seeds were selected and planted in rolls of germination paper. There were 150 seeds in each of the three test groups as well as in the control group. The control group received distilled water only and the test groups their respective liquid potencies of Carbo vegetabilis, which were prepared using distilled water. The germination rolls were incubated at 24°C in darkness for a total of 135 hours. After 39 hours the germinating seeds were replanted into fresh germination rolls. The process was repeated at 87 hours after the first measurements were taken. The final measurements were taken at 135 hours. Shoot lengths and root lengths were recorded and overall lengths calculated. Mean shoot, root and overall lengths were expressed as percentages ofthe control using bar graphs. At 87 hours the potency that consistently decreased the growth of Zea Mays was the 13CH. The 12CH potency only decreased the shoot growth, whereas the 14CH improved root growth. At 135 hours overall growth was significantly decreased in all the test groups, but most markedly in the 12CH groups where root growth was drastically inhibited. When compared with the 87th hour measurement, the 13CH group showed a 13% increase in shoot growth. Carbo vegetabilis potencies 12CH, 13CH and 14CH were found to significantly influence the growth of germinating Zea Mays seeds.

Mini-dissertation submitted in partial compliance with the requirements for the Master's Degree in Technology: Homoeopathy, Homoeopathy at the Durban Institute of Technology, 2002. / Dream provings are considered to be a new era in Homoeopathy and as such are met with a lot of scepticism. They involve getting in touch with the dynamic influence of the remedy and observing this influence on the vital force in the form of symptoms (Dam, 1998: 128). Dreams are a main focus of the proving as they are considered to be the 'royal way to the psycho-dynamic depth of the state of the remedy being proved' (Dam, 1998: 128). The motivations for their acceptance or rejection are both reasonable. To determine if they are provings that should appear in the Materia Medica and Repertory it needed to be seen if they revealed the same features of a remedy that a classical proving provides. / M

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M.Sc. / Pentanisia prunelloides belongs to the Rubiaceae family and is distributed in the grasslands of the eastern part of Southern Africa. The plant is an erect perennial herb that grows to be approximately 30 cm in height. It has stout hairy stems sprouting from a tuberous root. This plant produces pale purple flowers in early summer. P. prunelloides extracts are used in traditional medicine for a wide range of ailments such as colds, rheumatism, heartburn and sores. It is also incorporated in many multipurpose traditional medicines. The raw tuber is occasionally chewed to relief heartburn. The root decoctions were reported to have been used in the 1918 influenza pandemic with great success. The use of this plant in ethno-medicine suggests that it has bio-active principles which justify its continued use by different generations. It has shown to have anti-inflammatory, anti-viral and antibacterial properties. As far as the chemical composition is concerned, only palmitic acid was previously isolated. This compound can not account for all the chemotherapeutic properties of P. prunelloides. Thus this study was done to investigate the chemical constituents of P. prunelloides which may be responsible for its use as a medicinal plant. The plant material was collected from different areas in Swaziland and South Africa. Chemical variation screening was conducted using ether/hexane, methanol and boiling water extracts of the tuber and where possible the aerial parts of P. prunelloides. The methanol extracts were the only extracts used for TLC screening and the results showed the presence of terpenoids, saponins, amino acids, carbohydrates and phenolic compounds that were not identified previously. An attempt was made to quantify some of the compounds by means of HPLC and GC/MS. The compounds observed from all the tuber experiments demonstrated a limited level of variation both in quality and quantity within and between natural plant populations. The variation was found to be random and it was not correlated to the geographical distribution of this plant. This was concluded because variation was observed in plants which were from the same locality as well as different localities. iv The chemotypes observed between the tubers from Swaziland and South Africa were related. This means that there was no unique chemotype observed from plants from the two countries as chemotypes overlap. When considering the TLC of medium polarity compound and polar compounds of the aerial parts, three chemotypes were observed. Again these chemotypes were observed within and between natural plant populations. The occurrence of these chemotypes was random and was not correlated to the geographic distribution of the plants. The variations observed could be due to different developmental stages of the plants. The chemistry of P. angustifolia was also investigated and compared to that of P. prunelloides. This was done because these two species are used to treat the same ailments and could be physiologically mistaken for each other. It was established that the two species could be differentiated based on TLC as the two species contain different compounds. The methanol extract was used to isolate three of the major compounds from P. prunelloides. The compounds had different polarities with one compound being non-polar, another having medium polarity and the third one being polar. The structure of the compound with medium polarity was identified to be (–)-epicatechin, a flavanol, while the polar compound was sucrose. The structure of the non-polar compound could not be concluded due to the complex nature of this compound, but it was assumed to be a triterpenoid, or two stereoisomers of the same compound. The methanol extract was also fractionated to get three fractions which were non-polar, medium polar and polar extracts (containing the three isolated compounds respectively). These extracts together with the crude extract were subjected to antibacterial screening. Bioautographic tests did not show any specific zones from the separated compounds to have any significant antibacterial activity. However, the total extract and the non-polar fraction showed the highest activity with the non-polar fraction recording MIC values of not more than 1.25 mg/cm3. It was then assumed that the compounds from P. prunelloides worked additively or in synergy to produce the observed activity. In future more detailed chemical variation studies need to be done to investigate more specific factors such as soil type, age of the plant and seasonal variation. This would give better indications of when the plant has more of the active compounds thus giving a guide about the best harvesting time. Anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant tests may also prove to be interesting.

The major goal for physicochemical screening of pharmaceuticals is to predict human drug absorption, distribution, elimination, excretion and toxicity. These are all dependent on the lipophilicity of the drug, which is expressed as a partition coefficient i.e. a measure of a drug’s preference for the lipophilic or hydrophilic phases. The most common method of determining a partition coefficient is the shake flask method using octanol and water as partitioning media. However, this system has many limitations when modeling the interaction of ionised compounds with membranes, therefore, unreliable partitioning data for many solutes has been reported. In addition to these concerns, the procedure is tedious and time consuming and requires a high level of solute and solvent purity. Micellar liquid chromatography (MLC) has been proposed as an alternative technique for measuring partition coefficients utilising surfactant aggregates, known as micelles. This thesis investigates the application of MLC in determining micelle-water partition coefficients (logPMW) of pharmaceutical compounds of varying physicochemical properties. The effect of mobile phase pH and column temperature on the partitioning of compounds was evaluated. Results revealed that partitioning of drugs solely into the micellar core was influenced by the interaction of charged and neutral species with the surface of the micelle. Furthermore, the pH of the mobile phase significantly influenced the partitioning behaviour and a good correlation of logPMW was observed with calculated distribution coefficient (logD) values. More interestingly, a significant change in partitioning was observed near the dissociation constant of each drug indicating an influence of ionised species on the association with the micelle and retention on the stationary phase. Elevated column temperatures confirmed partitioning of drugs considered in this study was enthalpically driven with a small change in the entropy of the system because of the change in the nature of hydrogen bonding. Finally, a quantitative structure property relationship was developed to evaluate biological relevance in terms of predicting skin permeability of the newly developed partition coefficient values. This study provides a better surrogate for predicting skin permeability based on an easy, fast and cheap experimental methodology, and the method holds the predictive capability for a wider population of drugs. In summary, it can be concluded that MLC has the ability to generate partition coefficient values in a shorter time with higher accuracy, and has the potential to replace the octanol-water system for pharmaceutical compounds.

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