Chemical Fingerprinting Analysis For Discrimination Of Ficus Deltoidea Jack Varieties by Azeirah Azemin, Khamsah Suryati Mohd

Standardization of herbal materials based on their chemical and biological profile is an important prerequisite for development of herbal product. Proper identification of the source plant with related biological property is the main issue encountered in herbal standardization. Ficus deltoidea Jack is a South East Asian native plant traditionally used to treat several diseases. However, there are confusion on the identification of plant material as F. deltoidea have at least eight varieties namely F. deltoidea var. deltoidea, var. trengganuensis, var. kunstleri, var. motleyana, var. intermedia, var. borneensis, var. bilobata and var. angustifolia. Since reports on pharmacological and chemical studies were not at the varietal level, it is difficult to identify the best variety to be commercialized. The objectives of this monograph are to report the screening of the chemical composition of all F. deltoidea varieties and localities, determination of chemical fingerprints by chromatographic and spectroscopic techniques and analysis on the discrimination among varieties and localities by chemometric analysis. Eight varieties of F. deltoidea were collected from several localities around Malaysian Peninsular and Borneo. All samples were subjected to TLC, HPTLC and FTIR fingerprinting analysis using biologically active marker compounds, vitexin and isovitexin. Preliminary screening of the chemical composition by TLC and derivatization with various reagent proved that F. deltoidea constitutes a wide variety of chemical groups. Qualitative observation of the TLC chromatograms showed that there are differences in chemical composition between varieties and also between localities. The evaluation of the chemical pattern was carried out by HPTLC fingerprinting and reveals the differences of the marker content in F. deltoidea varieties and samples from different localities. Based on unsupervised pattern recognition analysis of FTIR spectra, results of eight varieties of methanol extract separated in eight clusters and five varieties of water extract separated in five clusters. For F. deltoidea var. borneensis that was collected from six locations, six samples of methanol extract were separated into five clusters and six samples of water extract were separated into four cluster. For F. deltoidea var. deltoidea, four samples of methanol extract were separated into four cluster and three samples of water extract were separated into three cluster. Meanwhile, for F. deltoidea var. kunstleri, three samples of methanol extract were successfully separated into three clusters as well as five methanol extracts of F. deltoidea var. trengganuensis that were separated into five clusters. Based on the good separation observed in the FTIR spectroscopic data, it seems reasonable to use chemical fingerprint coupled with unsupervised multivariate analysis to differentiate FD varieties and to differentiate sample locations. The findings from this project can be used as identification, classification and quality control methods for the standardization of Ficus deltoidea in herbal product development. The utilization of two internal markers, vitexin and isovitexin will be valuable to be used as quality control parameters.