Evaluación de la toxicidad de extractos de plantas cubanas con posible acción antiparasitaria utilizando larvas de Artemia salina L.

introduction: artemia salina lethality assay is considered a useful tool to determine preliminary toxicity of plant extracts. in our labs some plant species are studied because of their antiparasitic potentials. objective: to evaluate a. salina nauplii mortality caused by ethanol extracts of cuban medicinal plants. methods: a. salina larvae were exposed to four concentrations of 35 ethanol extracts from 34 plant species, for 24 hours. mean lethal concentration (lc50) was determined to classify each extract into the categories of extremely toxic, highly toxic, mildly toxic or non toxic. results: out of the tested extracts, only 5 (artemisia absinthium, luffa cylindrica, melia azedarach, melaleuca leucadendron and simarouba glauca) were classified as extremely or highly toxic, 13 as mildly toxic whereas 17 extracts (48,5 %) were non toxic exhibiting lc50 values over 1 000 μg/ml. conclusions: most of the evaluated extracts showed low toxicity, which is a positive result. the five extremely toxic extracts will not be included in further studies.