EVALUATION OF MORPHOLOGICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL VARIATION IN THE CONTENT OF URSOLIC ACID FROM CARISSA CARANDAS LINN. USING HPTLC

Abstract

Ursolic acid (UA), a hydroxyl pentacyclic triterpenoic acid found in Carissa carandas Linn., a folk medicine used for the treatment of various diseases and also an important component of plant based medicine. In the present work, a precise, accurate and reproducible densitometric HPTLC method is developed and validated in terms of sensitivity, linearity, recovery, specificity and ruggedness for the estimation of ursolic acid from various samples of Carissa carandas Linn. Chromatographic separation was achieved on silica gel 60 F254 plates with toluene: methanol (8: 1, v/v) as a mobile phase. Detection of ursolic acid was achieved by derivatizing the plate with 10% methanolic sulphuric acid followed by heating at 110°C for 10 min. Camag TLC scanner 4 equipped with winCATS software was used for densitometric scanning at 366 nm. The method was found applicable to evaluate the impact of morphological and geographical variations in the ursolic acid content from Carissa carandas ripe fruits and different morphological parts of Carissa carandas. Ursolic acid content in different morphological parts of Carissa carandas was found in the following order: Fruits > leaves > stems > flowers > seeds. Samples collected from Rajapur showed the maximum content while sample from Lonavla had minimum. The developed method was found useful for quantitation of bioactive marker ursolic acid from different samples of Carissa carandas and can be used as a routine quality control tool for the assessment of botanicals.