Chemical profile, antioxidant, anti-proliferative, anticoagulant and mutagenic effects of a hydroalcoholic extract of Tuscan Rosmarinus officinalis

This study aimed to characterise the chemical profile of an ethanolic extract of Tuscan Rosmarinus officinalis (Roex) and to determine its in vitro bioactivity. The content of phenolic and flavonoid compounds, hydroxycinnamic acids and triterpenoids was determined, and High-Performance Liquid Chromatography-Diode Array Detection (HPLC-DAD) analysis revealed that rosmarinic acid and hydroxycinnamic derivatives were the main constituents of the extract. Roex demon-strated to have both antioxidant activity and the capability to scavenge hydrogen peroxide in a concentration dependent manner. Moreover, NIH3T3 mouse fibroblasts and human breast ade-nocarcinoma cells MDA-MB-231 viability was influenced by the extract with an IC50 of 2.4x10-1 mg/mL and 4.8x10-1 mg/mL, respectively. The addition of Roex to the culture medium of both the above cell lines, resulted also in the reduction of cell death after H2O2 pretreatment. The Ames test demonstrated that Roex was not genotoxic towards both TA98 and TA100 strains, with and without S9 metabolic activation. At last, the extract, by inactivating thrombin, showed to have also an anti-coagulating effect at low concentration values. All these biological activities are tightly correlated to Roex to phytochemical profile, rich in bioactive compounds.