Antidandruff activity of Cassia auriculata and Cassia alata through fatty acids mediated inhibition of Malassezia furfur V. Prabhu * PG Department of Chemistry, Nallamuthu Gounder Mahalingam College, Pollachi (Tamil Nadu), India K. Poonkodi PG Department of Chemistry, Nallamuthu Gounder Mahalingam College, Pollachi (Tamil Nadu), India K. Pradeep PG Department of Chemistry, Nallamuthu Gounder Mahalingam College, Pollachi (Tamil Nadu), India S. Buvaneswari PG Department of Chemistry, Nallamuthu Gounder Mahalingam College, Pollachi (Tamil Nadu), India R. Mini PG Department of Chemistry, Nallamuthu Gounder Mahalingam College, Pollachi (Tamil Nadu), India K. Vimaladevi PG Department of Chemistry, Nallamuthu Gounder Mahalingam College, Pollachi (Tamil Nadu), India M. Anusuya PG Department of Chemistry, Nallamuthu Gounder Mahalingam College, Pollachi (Tamil Nadu), India Sibi G Department of Biotechnology, Indian Academy Degree College -Autonomous, Bangalore (Karnataka), India * Corresponding Author. Email: prabhusamruth@gmail.com Article Info https://doi.org/10.31018/ jans.v12i4.2390 Received: October 4, 2020 Revised: November 15, 2020 Accepted: November 20, 2020 How to Cite Prabhu V. et al. (2020). Antidandruff activity of Cassia auriculata and Cassia alata through fatty acids mediated inhibition of Malassezia furfur. Journal of Applied and Natural Science, 12(4):532 - 540. https://doi.org/10.31018/jans.v12i4.2390 This work is licensed under Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). © : Author (s). Publishing rights @ ANSF. Published online: November 24, 2020 ISSN : 0974-9411 (Print), 2231-5209 (Online) journals.ansfoundation.org Research Article INTRODUCTION Scalp has thick terminal hair, large numbers of sweat glands and sebaceous glands. Sebum secreted in stratum corneum provides a nutrient -enriched environment for microbial growth. Malassezia species are found on mammalian skin (Findley et al., 2013, Gemmer et al., 2002; Sampaio et al., 2011; Takemoto et al., 2015) associated with several com- mon skin disorders (Sugita et al., 2010). Malassezia is a lipophilic yeast that uses sebum lipids as a nutrient Abstract Susceptibility of Malassezia furfur to certain medium chain fatty acids shed light onto novel strategies to control dandruff. This study explored antidandruff activity of the fatty acids and other bioactive compounds from flowers of Cassia auriculata and Cas- sia alata. The idea was supplementing the growth medium with fatty acids which are inhibitory to Malassezia so that plant- based antidandruff formulations could be developed based on the results. Chloroform and ethanolic flower extracts were tested there in vitro efficacy against M. furfur and the potential antidandruff compounds were identified by gas chromatography -mass spectrophotometry (GC-MS). Minimum inhibitory concentrations were determined for both the extracts and IC 50 values of 50 and 88 µM for chloroform extract of C. auriculata and C. alata were recorded. For ethanol extract, IC 50 values of 75 and 70 µM were exhibited by C. auriculata and C. alata, respectively. Inhibition of M. furfur through fatty acids from Cassia is the first re- port, and it is possible to include specific fatty acids in the growth media to inhibit the growth of Malassezia which could be later served as lead molecules in antidandruff formulations. Further, the presence of citronellol, pinitol, anthracenedione and chrysine in Cassia flower extracts and their antidandruff activity reported in this study needed further research on those compounds to formulate effective treatment of Malassezia associated diseases. Keywords: Anti-dandruff, Cassia alata, Cassia auriculata, Fatty acids, Malassezia furfur