Introduction and chemical analysis of Angelica archangelica L. grown at Kaunas Botanical Garden, Vytautas Magnus University

Abstract

At present and in the future, it is necessary to enrich the assortment of the cultivated medicinal plant. Species of medicinal plants have been introduced ex situ in the medicinal plants collection at Kaunas Botanical Garden of Vytautas Magnus University since 1924 for this purpose. Biodiversity of plant resources, scarce information on bioactive compounds and their properties in many species, as well as increasing demand for naturalness of herbal medicines and food were the main motivation aspects of the present study. Angelica archangelica L., is a medicinal plant known for its cooking properties and its therapeutic uses. There is a link between medicinal properties and chemical compounds of the plant. That's why, the aim of this study was to carry out a comparative determination of total content of phenolic compounds, flavonoids and radical scanvenging activity between five different growth stages of this plant. Angelica archangelica L. was collected and air-dried at the Kaunas Botanical Garden in 2015. 0,5g of each stage were extracted with 20mL of methanol 75%, shaked during 24h, filtered and prepared for spectrophotometric analysis. Spectrophotometric methods were used to determine the total content of phenolic compounds (using Folin-Ciocalteu reagent), the total content of flavonoids (using a stock solution), and the total radical scavenging activity (using DPPH as a radical reagent). The results of this study suggest that the total radical scavenging activity is less important than the total content of phenolic compounds for each growth stages because all phenolic compounds can't reduce DPPH. However, the differences between both total are not significant. Moreover, this experiment demonstrates that the more important concentration of phenolic compounds and radical scavenging activity in Angelica archangelica L. are in the growth stage early bloom. Also, the total content of flavonoids is particularly lower than total content of phenolic compounds.