Potencial anti oxidante e anti-Alzheimer do pólen da abelha sem ferrão Tetragonisca angustula (Jataí)

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is considered the main cause of dementia in the elderly in the world, leading to progressive memory loss, impairment of cognitive and motor skills, generating a high degree of disability and dependence. The development of AD is related to the accumulation of senile plaques in the brain being caused by the amylodoigenic pathway of the disease, where several genetic and biochemical events are related to the development of AD, with oxidative stress being one of them. Due to the scarcity of drugs aimed at the treatment of AD, antioxidant compounds are increasingly being studied as therapeutic targets for the disease. Thus, in this work, we explore the antioxidant and anti-Alzheimer potential of the Tetragonisca angustula pollen extract in Drosophila melanogaster. For this, we produced Drosophila melanogaster AD-like, a model that expresses genes related to the amylodoigenic pathway of Alzheimer's disease. We investigated the floral origin of the collected pollen, carried out the phytochemical prospection and evaluated its antioxidant capacity in vitro. For the in vivo experiments, we evaluated in D. melanogaster the ability to survive and climb with different concentrations of the pollen extract. Our results showed that the pollen extract of Tetragonisca angustula has a considerable antioxidant response and high concentrations of important phytochemicals such as flavonoids and polyphenols, in addition, it was able to improve the survival of D. melanogaster and at all used concentrations it improved its ability to climbing of flies after 15 days of treatment. Thus, we demonstrate the capacity of Tetragonisca angustula pollen as an important product to be studied aiming at the isolation of molecules with a potential therapeutic target for Alzheimer's disease.