The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, for which the first cases were detected
in China in 2019, has recently started its ninth pandemic wave. In a recent overview,
the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that this disease, caused by the severe
acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS- CoV-2) has infected over 640 million
people and killed more than 6 million people over the world. Plants are considered
as inexhaustible sources of novel bioactive compounds and recent reviews demonstrated
that plants are rich in antiviral active compounds and particularly active against
coronavirus. In this context we investigated the antiviral activity of plants growing
in Auvergne, a region of France possessing a diversified flora, and we evaluated the
chemical profile and the antiviral potency of two plants. Our study described the
isolation and characterisation of specific alkaloid derivatives from two plants of
the amaryllidaceae familly: Narcissus pseudonarcissus L. and Narcissus poeticus L. We isolated two major alkaloids from N. pseudonarcissus and four major compounds from N. poeticus. Among these six alkaloids, one was a new compound that has never been described
and another one showed a similar antiviral activity on SARS-CoV-2 as Remdesivir, used
as a control, with an IC50 of around 1 μM. We also determined the selectivity index between cytotoxicity and
antiviral activity which was around 4.7.
