IPB Student Detects Arrowleaf Sida Fingerprint
Arrowleaf Sida is known to have many benefits and contains various chemical components. Previous studies related to the efficacy of Arrowleaf Sida leaves explain that Arrowleaf Sida plant contains alkaloid compounds, saponins, flavonoids, calcium oxalate, tannins, amino acids, and essential oils.
Arrowleaf Sida belongs to a group of 15 types of plants that are often used in the manufacture of drugs and herbal medicine in Indonesia. This plant has several benefits, including as boil treatment, threadworm treatment, anti-inflammatory, analgesic, diuretic, sputum treatment and so on.
The amount of chemical content present in this plant becomes a difficult factor to guarantee the safety and control of the quality of this medicinal plant.
Such difficulties may have an impact on drug counterfeiting if there is a decrease in the supply of raw materials. Usually this forgery is done by using a similar medicinal plant, but not necessarily have the same chemical compounds. Thus, it is necessary to have a fingerprint pattern with thin layer chromatography (TLC) to control the quality of this medicinal plant.
Sefni Reza Yolanda, Biochemistry Student of Bogor Agricultural University (IPB) has conducted research on fingerprint analysis of Arrowleaf Sida. Sefni did a research using Arrowleaf Sida leaf extract. After performing the extraction, the extract then were analyzed by using TLC. There were eight types of solvent used in this research, but the best three solvents were selected which showed the most spots with the best separation. Those were chloroform, ethyl acetate, and methanol.
As for the mixed solvent, it was found that the optimum phase of motion in separating the Arrowleaf Sida compound on the silica gel 60 F354 TLC plate was the mixture of chloroform, ethyl acetate, and methanol (6.5; 2; 1.5). The best separation result was obtained at 366 nm UV using sulfuric acid as a derivatization reagent.
The next stage was validation method. In general, the validation result of TLC fingerprint analysis met the criteria of acceptance, except in the test of the rigidity. Therefore, this TLC method can be used for Arrowleaf Sida leaf simplicia quality control. (FM)
