One day in the future, you might rub a plant-based substance on your skin that both protects you from UV light and acts as a strong antioxidant. According to a new study published in Photochemistry and Photobiology and reported by StudyFinds, scientists have extracted a compound named brachycerine from the leaves of a million rainforest tree called Psychotria brachyceras.
We tend to underplay the dangers of sun damage, often brushing it off as just a simple sunburn that reddens and peels before we move on. But a single dose of ultraviolet light can destroy up to half of the nerve endings in unprotected skin while disrupting your cellular DNA. Researchers applied brachycerine-infused formulas to real human skin samples obtained from plastic surgery patients before blasting them with UV-A and UV-B radiation.
Untreated skin and placebo-treated samples showed the expected nerve loss and DNA damage; the brachycerine-treated samples showed virtually no nerve fiber degradation and no detectable DNA damage. None of this would mean much of anything if the substance were ultimately toxic to mammalian cells, but luckily cytotoxicity tests confirmed the compound isn’t toxic.
Scientists Found Something in a Rainforest Plant That Could Make Sunscreen Even Better
Brachycerine is a glucoside alkaloid, and it seems to be doing all the heavy lifting here. It both shields skin from UV light and reduces the chemicals an irradiated blast of sunlight produces. Standard sunscreens usually just block rays, leaving whatever sneaks through to mess up your tissue.
Remember, this study was conducted on human skin samples and not actual humans. Experiments on living human subjects are still a way off. None of this means you should toss out your sunscreen anytime soon and replace it with some goop from a tree in Brazil, but scientists already know how to sustainably propagate the tree, so it may not be long before your new favorite sunscreen is harvested from a plant.
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