METHODS FOR EXTRACTION AND ISOLATION OF AGATHISFLAVONE FROM POINCIANELLA PYRAMIDALIS

Agathisflavone is a natural biflavone with restricted occurrence in plants. This biflavone presents several biological activities and can be important to developing new drugs. Obtaining such a molecule on a large scale for in vivo tests is a challenge. To date, there are no reports regarding its synthesis; thus, it is important to improve and develop methods for the purification of this bioactive compound from natural sources. Previous studies indicated that the leaves of Poincianella pyramidalis (Leguminosae) had agathisflavone predominantly. However, obtaining this compound requires some steps of chromatographic procedures and extraction with organic solvents. This paper compares four procedures for the purification of agathisflavone from its leaves, two by traditional chromatographic techniques and by complexation with inorganic bases. The purification in the automatic flash chromatography in two steps provides a high-yield extraction; the two procedures using alkaline extraction and the traditional method reduced to three steps provided the compound with similar yields. The biflavone was identified by TLC, and HPLC analysis showed that it was isolated with > 99% of purity. Thus, the applied methodologies provided the purification of this compound employing less volume of solvents, the number of chromatographic column procedures, and time-consuming, with increased yields.