Chemical Constituents, Bioactivity and HPLC Profiling Of Microwave-Assisted and Normal Extraction of Murraya Koenigii

Murraya koenigii (L.) Spreng is an aromatic plant, which is normally used as natural flavoring in curries and sources, and commonly found in India and Peninsular Asia. Locally, Murraya koenigii is known as curry leaf tree and one of the richest source of carbazole alkaloids. It has been reported that carbazole alkaloids possess various biological activities such as anti-tumor, anti-oxidative, anti-mutagenic and anti-inflammatory activities. In this work, six carbazole alkaloids: mahanimbine (33), girinimbine (17), murrayanine (31), murrayafoline-A (62), murrayacine (39) and 3-methylcarbazole (63), one long chain ester (61) together with β-sitosterol (24) were isolated from leaves, stem barks, and roots of Murraya koenigii by using normal extraction (NE) and microwave-assisted extraction (MAE). The structures of these compounds were established by spectroscopic method and by comparison with the previous reported works. The essential oil of the fresh curry leaves was obtained using conventional hydrodistillation (CHD) and microwave-assisted hydrodistillation (MAHD), and were analyzed by gas chromatography and GC-MS techniques. Most of the components of the oils obtained from both techniques of distillation were rather similar but with different variations of quantities. In the essential oil obtained from conventional hydrodistillaion (CHD), the major compound was α-farnesene (18.74%), whereas the major constituent of oils from microwave-assisted hydrodistillation (MAHD) was 4,11,11-trimethyl-8-methylenebicycloundec-4-ene (29.67%). All crude extracts and carbazole alkaloids isolated from Murraya koenigii were screened their cytotoxic activities towards human T-promyelocytic leukemic cell lines (HL-60), human colon cancer cells (HT-29), human breast cancer cells (MCF-7) and human cervical carcinoma cancer cells (HeLa) and all isolated compounds were strongly active with IC50 values gave less than 20 μg/ml. In the larvicidal activity, the crude extracts and isolated compounds were tested against the larvae of Aedes aegypti. All crude extracts and isolated compounsds showed very strong activity against Aedes aegypti with LC50 values of between 0.68 ppm to 55.03 ppm. In the antimicrobial screening, only crude chloroform extract of roots of Murraya koenigii showed low activity against Bacillus subtilis, while the antifungal test showed that the crude chloroform extract of roots and murrayafoline-A (62) showed low activity against the Candida albicans. The bioactivity tests carried out in this research which include antimicrobial activity of some pathogenic microbes, cytotoxicity tests against some cancer cell lines (HL-60, MCF-7, HT-29 and HeLa) and larvicidal activity properties against Aedes aegypti were never been reported previously. In addition, the microwave-assisted extraction of the plant and the development of the profiling of the extracts based on using HPLC-UV technique were never been investigated before.

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