Research Article Determination of Flavonoids, Phenolic Acids, and Xanthines in Mate Tea (Ilex paraguariensis St.-Hil.)

Copyright © 2013 Mirza Bojic ́ et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Raw material, different formulations of foods, and dietary supplements of mate demands control of the content of bioactive sub-stances for which high performance thin layer chromatography (TLC), described here, presents simple and rapid approach for detections as well as quantification. Using TLC densitometry, the following bioactive compounds were identified and quantified: chlorogenic acid (2.1mg/g), caffeic acid (1.5mg/g), rutin (5.2mg/g), quercetin (2.2mg/g), and kaempferol (4.5mg/g). The results obtained with TLC densitometry for caffeine (5.4mg/g) and theobromine (2.7mg/g) show no statistical difference to the content of total xanthines (7.6mg/g) obtained by UV-Vis spectrophotometry.Thus, TLC remains a technique of choice for simple and rapid analysis of great number of samples as well as a primary screening technique in plant analysis. 1