New flavane gallates from the aerial part of an African/Arabian medicinal plant Plicosepalus curviflorus by LC-MS and NMR based molecular characterization

Abstract

Plicosepalus curviflorus is distributed in Africa, Yemen and Saudi Arabia and applied to treat cancer, tonsillitis, otitis media and for curing diabetes. The objective of this study is to isolate chemical constituents from this medicinally important plant and it yielded one undescribed gallocatechin derivative 1 along with nine known compounds 2–10. In this study, the metabolite profiling of n-butanol fraction of P. curviflorus was also measured by using liquid chromatography-quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (LC-QTOf-MS). Our research provided the facts for the theory that this plant is a good source of flavane and flavonoids and can be used as medicine. This application allowed to unambiguously identify eight compounds 11–18 from n-butanol soluble fraction of P. curviflorus. We describe here complete characterization of one new compound isolated from the n-butanol soluble fraction of P. curviflorus by NMR and ESI-MS. To the best of our good grasp, compounds 12–15, represents the example of substituted catechin derivatives identified by LC-QTOf-MS method.