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ADIL EL HADRI Y COLS. AN. R. ACAD. NAC. FARM.

tial in treating cancer “in vivo” as it shows strong antitumorigenic ac-
tivities in mice (18).

In this study, we report the chemical composition of S. officinalis
collected in the north-west of Morocco. The leaf essential oil and its
active fractions, subfractions and sub-subfractions obtained were in-
vestigated by gas chromatography (GC) and GC/mass spectrometry
(GC-MS) analysis. They were tested against two human cancer cell
lines (HCT-116, MCF-7) and murine macrophage cell line (RAW264.7)
under in vitro conditions.

2. MATERIALS AND METHODS

2.1. Essential oil

The leaves of S. officinalis plant were collected in Tétouan area,
north-west of Morocco in June 2008. The botanical identification of
Salvia plant and the extraction of essential oil were realized in the
Biology and Health laboratory of the Département de Biologie,
Université Abdelmalek Essaâdi Tétouan. Two thousand grams of fresh
material were submitted to hydrodistillation for 3 h using a Clevenger-
type apparatus. The white-yellow essential oil was dried over anhy-
drous sodium sulphate and stored at 4 ºC.

2.2. Fractionation of S. officinalis essential oil

Column chromatography was used for the fractionation of the es-
sential oil. Fifteen grams of the S. officinalis essential oil was fraction-
ated using a column chromatography (1.5 cm× 500 cm) packed with
100 g of silica gel 60, equilibrated with hexan. The column was elut-
ed successively with 250 ml each of n-hexan (100), n-hexan-ethyl ac-
etate (95/5, 90/10, 85/15, 75/25, 50/50, 20/80, 10/90), ethyl acetate (100),
and methanol. The organic solvents were removed from the eluates by
evaporation under reduced pressure to get nine fractions (F1-F9). The
first fraction F1 showed a significant cytotoxic activity and was fur-
ther fractionated (Table 2). First by preparative thin-layer chromatog-
raphy (TLC) and achieved using silica gel 60-F254-precoated plates

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