Chemical fingerprint of Centella Asiatica’s bioactive compounds in the ethanolic and aqueous extracts

Abstract

Centella asiatica is a herbal plant that is widely used as medicine due to the benefit of its bioactive compounds such as rutin, kaempferol, quercetin, gallic acid, luteolin and catechin. Typically, the amount of these bioactive compounds are varies depending on the solvent used. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the chemical fingerprint of six Centella asiatica’s bioactive compounds (kaempferol, quercetin, luteolin, gallic acid, rutin and catechin) in the ethanolic and aqueous ethanol extracts. Water, ethanol, and 50% aqueous ethanol were used as extracting solvents via maceration (solid-liquid) technique to extract bioactive compounds from C.asiatica. Rotary evaporator procedure was performed to concentrate the extracts before these crudes were analysed using HPLC instrument. The percentage yield of crude extract (% w/w) was calculated, and its mathematical model was reported in this study. The exponential equation model was also applied to predict the percentage yield of the C.asiatica extract. From the equation, satisfactory results have been obtained, which gave less than 12.21% error with 0.9967 of R² value. Besides, the percentage yield of bioactive compounds resulting from HPLC analysis was also explained. HPLC result showed that kaempferol was the highest bioactive compound with 373.2 mg/g dry powder using 100% ethanol as extract solvent. Therefore, the development of this study can be extended to assess this plant potential in the formulation of pharmaceutical and cosmetic products.