Original Articles
Barkai Hassan, Elabed Soumya,
Abstract
Many substances have been reported as antibacterial agents and some as antifungal in the scientific literature. The aim of this study was to evaluate the antifungal potential of three main compounds of essential oils, β-Ionone; carvone and 1,8-cineole, against the growth of spores of Aspergillus niger strain. For that purpose, the spores of the studied strain were exposed to successive concentrations of these three compounds to determine their minimum inhibitory (MIC) and fungicidal (MFC) concentrations against this pathogenic strain by the microdilution method using the 96 well microtiter plates. The obtained results have shown the capacity of three compounds to inhibit the growth of A. niger spores with low values of CMIs determined for β-Ionone (2.5%), carvone (0.625%) and 1,8-cineole (1.25%). Furthermore, the determination of MFCs allowed to find that minimum concentrations, necessary to eliminate definitively the initial inoculum of A. niger spores, were 10% for β-Ionone when that of carvone was only 5%. The MFC of 1,8-cineole compound was not determined even at 10% of concentration. This study, which showed for the first time the antifungal potential of these three compounds against this pathogenic fungi, also allow to highlight the possibility of using these three compounds in formulation of commercial antifungal products.