Potential antibacterial action of alpha-pinene

The indiscriminate use of antibiotics generates several problems for human health, the main one being bacterial resistance, responsible for making drugs ineffective, making it difficult to treat diseases and representing a major obstacle for researchers and health professionals. Natural alternatives have been widely studied, such as essential oils and their phytoconstituents, in order to verify their antibacterial action. In order to identify scientific evidence of the antibacterial activity of alpha-pinene, an integrative review was carried out whose bibliographic survey used the LILACS and MEDLINE research bases, through the Virtual Health Library, PubMed and Web of Science, using the MeSH terms : anti-bacterial, alpha-pinene and anti-microbial agents associated with the Boolean operators “AND” and “OR”. Studies with full text available, published in the last 5 years, in Portuguese, English and Spanish and that addressed the antibacterial effect on different bacterial strains of the alpha-pinene compound were included, while literature reviews, books, editorials, dissertations and theses were included. were excluded. At the end of reading the articles in full, 10 works were selected to compose this review. The action of alpha-pinene was evaluated in the form of its racemic mixture and its positive and negative enantiomers, as well as its action alone or in association with antibiotics on several bacterial species, including Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Salmonella Enterica and Campylobacter. fasting. The results indicate that alpha-pinene has a wide potential in antimicrobial therapy, acting to inhibit the development of bacteria; however, when used against certain bacterial strains, it has bactericidal and bacteriostatic limitations. Therefore, it is concluded that the development of scientific research is relevant to analyze the effectiveness of this compound to the most diverse microorganisms that affect human health.