Antiviral potential of medicinal plants: a case study with guava tree against dengue virus using a metabolomic approach

With an estimated annual incidence of 400 million cases, dengue virus is the most widespread arbovirus. No antiviral against dengue fever is currently available and only symptomatic care is provided to patients. After a brief overview of dengue disease with a special focus on medicinal plants which have been shown to display activity against dengue virus, this chapter describes an original approach to rapidly highlight active compounds from a medicinal plant extract. Starting from Psidium guava leaves, the workflow involves comprehensive chemical profiling from a small set of fractions parallelized to biological tests on dengue virus. The use of multivariate data analysis allowed the correlation of putative compounds carrying the inhibitory action. Biological assays on top-ranked compounds confirmed the activity of jacoumaric acid with an EC50 between 2.52 and 9.62 µg/mL depending on dengue virus serotypes.