Microsoft Word - CET--006.docx CHEMICAL ENGINEERING TRANSACTIONS VOL. 59, 2017 A publication of The Italian Association of Chemical Engineering Online at www.aidic.it/cet Guest Editors: Zhuo Yang, Junjie Ba, Jing Pan Copyright © 2017, AIDIC Servizi S.r.l. ISBN 978-88-95608- 49-5; ISSN 2283-9216 Determination of Total Flavonoids in Leek by AlCl3 Colorimetric Assay Hua Liu*, Yinghua Song, Xiaojuan Zhang School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Anshun College, Anshun 561000, China lzyh1235@126.com Rutin was taken as reference substance, and the conditions of aluminum chloride colorimetric assay for determining total flavonoids in leek extract were optimized. The effects of several parameters, such as dosage of color developing agent, buffer dosage, pH and reaction temperature and time, on the color development reaction of total flavonoids were evaluated. The optimum conditions were as follows: 1 mL appropriate concentrationor of leek extract, added 1 mL of HAc-NaAc buffer (pH4.8), 2mL of 0.1mol·L-1AlCl3 solution, volume calibration with 70% ethanol to 10 mL and mixing, and 12 min of water bath at 40°C. Under the optimum conditions, the maximum absorption wavelengths of standard rutin solution and leek extract coincided (407nm), with the absorbances reaching maxima also. The method has high stability, reproducibility and recovery. Compared with the commonly used NaNO2-Al (NO3) 3-NaOH colorimetric method, it is considered that the method of determination of total flavonoids in leek by AlCl3 colorimetric assay is more suitable when rutin was taken as reference substance 1. Introduction Allium tuberosum is a perennial herb in the genus Allium (Amaryllidaceae family), with a special and strong leek odor. The leaves are commonly known as leek. With abundant nutrients, leek contains trace elements beneficial to human body as well as highly volatile sulfur compounds and flavonoids of medicinal values. Until now, the volatile oilsin leek have been extensively studied (Wei and Wan, 1996; Wei and Ren, 2003; Wang and Feng, 2002), but the flavonoids therein remain largely unknown. Total flavonoids in plants has a wide range of physiological activity, such as anti-oxidation, anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial effects (Joyeux et al, 1995; Balasubramanian et al., 2007; Reinwalds, 2006); They are generally determined by direct spectrophotometry, colorimetry and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) (Wang et al., 2012; Zeraik and Yariwak, 2012; Fu et al., 2012; Marques et al., 2013; Wang et al., 2012). Direct spectrophotometry has low sensitivity. HPLC results are accurate, but the equipment is expensive, failing to meet the general requirements of industrialization. Total flavonoids have most commonly been detected by colorimetric methods, especially that using NaNO2-Al(NO3)3-NaOH (Jia et al., 2015). Huang et al. also determined the total flavonoid content of leek by this method (Huang et al., 2007), but they did not systematically assess its feasibility. However, the NaNO2-Al(NO3)3-NaOH colorimetric method cannot exclude the interference of non-flavonoids such aso-dihydric phenols (Guo et al., 2002; Li and Zhang, 2010; Qiu et al., 2013). Therefore, this method is not highly specific to total flavonoid determination. In this study, an AlCl 3 colorimetric method was employed to explore the factors influencing the determination of total flavonoids in leek, with rut in as the reference substance. Finally, the conditions for determination were optimized. This simple, feasible, reproducible and stable method can be used as one of the preferred strategies for determining total flavonoids in leek (Sun et al., 2016). 2. Methods 2.1 Solution configuration Rutin and AlCl3 configuration with 70% ethanol volume, the buffer solution with distilled water. DOI: 10.3303/CET1759130 Please cite this article as: Hua Liu, Yinghua Song, Xiaojuan Zhang, 2017, Determination of total flavonoids in leek by alcl3 colorimetric assay, Chemical Engineering Transactions, 59, 775-780 DOI:10.3303/CET1759130 775 2.2 Preparation of leek extract Clean leek leaves were dried, chopped, fully ground into 10g, added 70% ethanol at the sample/liquid ratio of 1/10 (g/mL), and subjected to ultrasonic extraction (temperature: 40°C; time: 15 minutes). After suction filtration, the filtrate was volume-calibrated to 100mL with70% ethanol, as thesample extract. 2.3 Factors affecting AlCl3 colorimetric determination of total flavonoids in leek The results are shown in Table 1-5. 2.4 Plotting of standard curvefor rutin Rutin reference solutions (0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0 and 2.5mL) were pipetted into 10mL colorimeter tubes with stopper, followed by addition of 1mL of pH 4.8 HAc-NaAc buffer and 2mL of AlCl3 solution (0.1 mol·L -1) sequentially. After volume calibration with 70% ethanol and mixing, the tubes were then left in a 40°C water bath for 12 min. The absorbance (A) at 407 nm was linearly regressed with the concentration (C, mg·mL-1) of rutin sample solution, and the standard curve was plotted. 2.5 Evaluation of the method The stability and reproducibility of the method and the spiked recoveries were measured, and the results were calculated (Yan et al., 2015) and shown in Table 6-8 2.6 Comparison by AlCl3 and NaNO2-Al (NO3) 3-NaOH Colorimetric Follow-up experiment was referred to the literature (Chen et al., 2016) by NaNO2-Al (NO3) 3-NaOH Colorimetric to determine total flavonoids in leek simply. Three times in parallel. And the results of determination of AlCl3 colorimetric were compared. The results are shown in Table 9. 3. Results and discussion Rutin reference substance and leekextract both have maximum absorption peaks at about 280nm and 400nm (Figure 1). Considering peak shape and excluding interference of proteins during leek extraction (Tian and Zhang, 2008), we finally selected the absorption peak at approximately 400nm. The results are shown in Table 1. Figure 1: Ultraviolet Scanning Spectra of Rutin Standard and Extract Figure 2: Ultraviolet Spectrum of Rutin Figure 3: Ultraviolet Spectrum of Extract 776 The standard curve is shown in Figure 4. The linear regression equation of absorbance (A) versus concentration of rutin sample solution (C, mg·mL-1) was A = 25.45C+0.003(R2 = 0.9993), suggesting that the linear relationship was good when this concentration ranged from 0.0075 mg/mL to 0.0375 mg/mL. Figure 4: The standard curve for rutin Table 1: Effect of the dosages of aluminum chloride Sample dosages of aluminum chloride (mL) Λmax(nm) A Rutin 0.5 408 0.5708 1.0 408 0.5722 1.5 407 0.5753 2.0 407 0.5832 2.5 406 0.5696 3.0 404 0.5535 4.0 403 0.5529 5.0 401 0.5451 Leek extract 0.5 410 0.5825 1.0 408 0.6250 1.5 407 0.6336 2.0 407 0.6502 2.5 406 0.6371 3.0 404 0.6285 4.0 403 0.6170 5.0 396 0.6096 Table 2: Effect of pH of HAc-NaAc buffer system Sample pH Λmax(nm) A Rutin 4.0 399 0.5587 4.4 405 0.5662 4.8 407 0.5821 5.2 408 0.5689 5.6 410 0.5546 6.0 410 0.5429 Leek extract 4.0 406 0.6020 4.4 406 0.6365 4.8 407 0.6508 5.2 407 0.6287 5.6 408 0.6155 6.0 408 0.6086 777 Table 3: Effect of dosage of HAc-NaAc buffer system Sample dosage of buffer (mL) Λmax(nm) A Rutin 0.5 406 0.5565 1.0 407 0.5763 1.5 409 0.5689 2.0 409 0.5523 2.5 412 0.5629 3.0 413 0.5667 5.0 415 0.5626 Leek extract 0.5 410 0.6023 1.0 407 0.6359 1.5 407 0.6117 2.0 405 0.6068 2.5 403 0.5910 3.0 399 0.5775 5.0 395 0.5531 Table 4: Effect of reaction temperature Sample Temperature (°C) Λmax(nm) A Rutin 20 407 0.5501 30 407 0.5632 40 407 0.5712 50 407 0.5585 60 407 0.5458 Leek extract 20 407 0.6075 30 407 0.6229 40 407 0.6426 50 407 0.6272 60 407 0.6168 Table 5: Effect of reaction time Sample Time (min) Λmax(nm) A Rutin 4 407 0.5580 8 407 0.5658 12 407 0.5826 16 407 0.5673 20 407 0.5531 Leek extract 4 407 0.6075 8 407 0.6302 12 407 0.6451 16 407 0.6343 20 407 0.6135 Table 6: Stability tests of the determination results Leek extract A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 A SD RSD/% 1mL 0.6502 0.6488 0.6506 0.6471 0.6505 0.6494 0.0015 0.2310 Table 7: Reproducibility tests of the determination results Leek extract A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 A SD RSD/% 1mL 0.6508 0.6491 0.6477 0.6435 0.6429 0.6468 0.0035 0.5411 778 Table 8: Recovery tests of total flavonoid The original number of total flavonoids(mg) The amount of rutin added(mg) Final measurement of total Flavonoids(mg) Recovery rate (%) 0.1412 0. 05 0.1913 100.2 0.1412 0.1 0.2411 99.9 0.1412 0.15 0.2913 100.1 Under the same conditions, the results showed that the extract had no obvious maximum absorption peak at 500-550 nm, while the rutin reference substance had the maximum absorption at 510 nm (Figure 5). It was taken 510nm as comparison to determine total flavonoids in Leek by NaNO2-Al (NO3)3-NaOH colorimetric. And the results were compared with the method of AlCl3 colorimetric. The results are shown in Table 9. Figure 5: Ultraviolet spectrum by NaNO2-Al (NO3)3-NaOH Colorimetric Table 9: The results of flavonoid content by two methods in leek Method AlCl3 Method NaNO2-Al (NO3)3-NaOH Method Number 1 2 3 1 2 3 Flavonoid Content(mg/g) 2.36 2.33 2.35 1.86 1.83 1.88 By comparison, the content of flavonoids by two methods was not consistent when the same amount of extract. AlCl3 method was higher than NaNO2-Al (NO3)3-NaOH method. This may be that NaNO2-Al (NO3)3- NaOH method for measuring the specificity of flavonoid content is not strong. The specific composition of the flavonoids in leek is still to be further analyzed and studied. 5. Discussion and Conclusion In this study, the conditions for determining total flavonoids in leekby AlCl3 colorimetric assaywere optimized. The effects of dosage of color developing agent, systempH, buffer dosage, temperature and time on the color development reaction of AlCl3 were assessed. By changing the factors, the maximum absorption peaks and corresponding absorbances of rutin reference substance and leek extract were altered, but each factor exerted different effects onthe two solutions. Probably, compared with standard rutin solution, the leek extract had more flavonoids. However, their maximum absorption peakscoincidedunder a certain optimumcondition of eachfactor. When the color development reaction was conducted at 40°C for 12 min after addition of 1 mL of pH 4.8 HAc- NaAc buffer and 2 mL of ACl3 solution (0.1 mol·L -1) into 1 mL of leek extract at an appropriate concentrationor rutin, volume calibration with 70% ethanol to 10 mL and mixing, the maximum absorption peaks of the two solutions were both located at 407 nm. 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