The Atlas cedar belongs to the Pinaceae family of trees
and can
be found in a crucial resinous mountain forest in Morocco that spans
133,000 hectares. This endemic species is valued for its wood quality
and essential oil (EO), which has various biological activities. However,
pathogenic fungi, particularly
Trametes pini
and
Ungulina officinalis
, frequently
attack Atlas cedarwood, causing significant damage and loss of value.
This study aims to extract EO from both healthy and infected Atlas
cedarwood to promote its valorization and to assess the antibacterial
properties of the resulting EOs. The EOs from healthy and sick cedarwood,
as well as a combination of these woods, were extracted using hydrodistillation
and simultaneous hydrodistillation. Gas chromatography and mass spectrometry
were used to examine the chemical compositions of the EOs. In addition,
the disk diffusion method and a measurement of the minimum inhibitory
concentration were used to assess the EOs’ antibacterial activity
against two bacterial strains, namely,
Escherichia
coli
(
E. coli
) and
Staphylococcus aureus
(
S. aureus
). The results show that the extraction yields of healthy cedarwood,
cedarwood infected by
Trametes pini
, and cedarwood infected by
U. officinalis
were 1.43 ± 0.03, 0.56 ± 0.03, and 0.26 ± 0.06%,
respectively, Moreover, the antibacterial results showed that neither
the healthy nor the diseased cedar oil had any impact on either strain.
However, the EOs from some binary mixtures (75:25, 50:50, and 25:75%)
of cedarwood infected by
Trametes pini
and cedarwood infected by
U.ngulina officinalis
and the mixture of healthy cedarwood and cedarwood infected by the
two fungi inhibited the growth of
S. aureus
with different MIC values. The findings of this research could lead
to the development of new products with antibacterial properties,
such as natural disinfectants, and reduce the amount of waste generated
by the cedar industry.