Factors affecting the phase behavior and antimicrobial activity of carvacrol microemulsions

The aim of this study was to investigate some factors that can contribute to the formulation of aqueous-based carvacrol microemulsion that can potentially be used in food preservation or disinfection. For this purpose the capacity of formation of carvacrol microemulsion was first revealed by studying the phase behavior of that compound in five different non-ionic microemulsion systems. Factors affecting that phase behavior like the type of non-ionic surfactant and presence of solubilization enhancers were also studied. The fully dilutable microemulsion system that can incorporate high carvacrol amount, as revealed from the phase diagrams, was chosen for the antibacterial evaluation study. The same microemulsion system was re-formulated in a cationic form by substituting the non-ionic surfactant, Tween 20 (T20) with the cationic cetylpyridinium chloride (CPC). The disc diffusion method was used to evaluate the activity of these microemulsion systems against different pathogenic bacteria. Results of the phase behavior study showed that carvacrol is a challenging phenolic compound which did not lend itself easily for solubilization in a fully dilutable non-ionic microemulsion. Incorporation of some solubilization enhancers like propylene glycol (PG) or short chain alcohols can fulfill this purpose however high surfactant/carvacrol ratio (9:1) was still required to solubilize only 1.0 wt% carvacrol in dilutable microemulsion. The antibacterial evaluation study at that concentration revealed that non-ionic carvacrol microemulsion formulated with T20 and a solubilization enhancer did not exhibit better antimicrobial activity than the same concentration of carvacrol formulated in surfactant-free aqueous solution composed of water/PG (1:1). On the other hand, the CPC-formulated carvacrol microemulsion showed significantly higher antibacterial activity than T20-formulated microemulsion. Results of the current investigation shed the light on the solubilization capacity and phase behavior of carvacrol in non-ionic microemulsion and the potential of using cationic carvacrol microemulsion in disinfection and decontamination applications.