Chromatographic determination of bioactive compounds in Hippophae leaf extracts: a comparative study of three varieties.

Seabuckthorn plants (Hippophae Linn), belonging to the family Elaeagnaceae have shown diverse therapeutic potential and the adaptogenic activity of some of the species have also been established in our previous studies. The present study aims to characterize aqueous and alcoholic leaf extracts of three different varieties of seabuckthorn, namely, Hippophae salicifolia, Hippophae rhamnoides mongolica and Hippophae rhamnoides turkestanica and evaluate their antioxidant potential in vitro. An elaborate characterization of phytochemicals such as volatile organic compounds (VOC) and flavonoids occurring in the concerned extracts has been carried out by GC-MS and HPTLC respectively. GC-MS demonstrated the presence of 35 distinct VOCs in the seabuckthorn leaf extracts which are known to possess substantial pharmacological and antioxidant potential. The most abundant VOCs identified were trimethylsilyl palmitate, methyl octadec-9-enoate, methyl palmitate, methyl stearate and methyl (9E)-9-octadecenoate. HPTLC results revealed variable quantities of quercetin, gallic acid, ascorbic acid and rutin in all the seabuckthorn leaf extracts. HPTLC-centered chemometric analysis using R programming helped to distinguish among the various extracts based on pattern recognition and unsupervised clustering, thus, enabling grouping of the extracts for further studies