Descrição
Aromatic and medicinal plants, widely used as folk medicine are, beyond fruits, vegetables
grains and spices, the principal source of antioxidant compounds. Several studies
demonstrated that antioxidants have also antifungal activity (Jayashree & Subramanyam,
2000; Rasooli & Abyaneh, 2004). More and more, humanity try to replace synthetic
metabolites by natural metabolites. Therefore, studies in aromatic and medicinal plants with
the capacity to produce a different range of secondary metabolites extremely increase in late
years. On the other hand, chemical products, like pesticides, fungicides or bactericides are
widely used in agriculture. However, they have disadvantages to the environment, due to
contamination of the soils, the final consumers or the producers. Still, the indiscriminate and
recurrent use of synthetic fungicides has been found to induce resistance in several fungi,
the residual toxicity of these compounds result in human health hazards and requires
caution in their use for plant disease control (Singh et al., 2009). Thus, some aromatic and
medicinal plants, with antifungal capacity (Soliman & Badeaa, 2002; Goun et al. 2003;
Sucharita & Padma, 2010), like genus Thymus, Mentha, Calendula and Catharanthus were
micropropagated for antifungal activity evaluation.