76 Available online at www.derpharmachemica.com ISSN 0975-413X CODEN (USA): PCHHAX Der Pharma Chemica, 2017, 9(12):76-78 (http://www.derpharmachemica.com/archive.html) Organic Acids of Mesembryanthemum Forskalii Herb and Flowers Moeen F Dababneh 1 , Viktoriia S Kyslychenko 2 , Iryna O Zhuravel 2 , Iryna G Gurieva 2 1 Aljouf University, Aljouf, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 2 National University of Pharmacy, Kharkiv, Ukraine ABSTRACT Plants are an important source of biologically active compounds that have been used for ages all over the world to treat and prevent various disorders. Samh (Mesembryanthemum forskalii Hochst) is a plant traditionally used in Saudi Arabia as a medicinal plant, and a profound study of its chemical constituents is needed. Carboxylic acids are one of the most important classes of biologically active compounds that possess antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antitumor and other properties. So the scope of present paper was to study the composition and content of organic acids in M. forskalii herb and flowers. As the results have shown, both types of the plant material studied have revealed the presence of 26 organic acids with hexadicarboxylic acid present only in the herb and 2-hydroxy-3-methylglutaric acid detected in the flowers only. Both types of the plant material studied tend to accumulate oxalic, malic and citric acids, while flowers were also rich in levulinic, linoleic, succinic and ferulic acids. Keywords: Organic acids, GC-MS, Mesembryanthemum forskalii INTRODUCTION Pharmaceutical science has always been focused on developing new medicines with high therapeutic activity and minor side effects. Phytochemists all over the world are in the permanent search for the new herbal sources of biologically active compounds. Therefore plants used in traditional folk medicine of different countries are being extensively studied in this objective. Our attention was focused on samh (Mesembryanthemum forskalii Hochst). The samh seeds have been widely used by Bedouins of Saudi Arabia as a substitute for wheat grain. The seeds were used in a ground state and made into bread or cooked. The study of the effects of samh seeds on the progress of streptozocin-induced diabetes in rats has revealed that adding 5% of the seeds to the diet show hypoglycaemic and hypolipidaemic effects [1-7]. Carboxylic acids are organic compounds possessing a carboxyl functional group. This is a vast group of biologically active compounds which are found in all plants. It includes aliphatic acids; those possessing a long chain are traditionally called fatty acids, alicyclic and aromatic acids. Thus, different representatives of this diverse class of compounds can show various pharmacological effects, such as antioxidant [2], anti- inflammatory, antitumor [4], hepatoprotective [5], neuroprotective [8,9] etc. Our study was focused on the composition and content of organic acids in M. forskalii flowers and herb which will help us understand the pharmacological effects of the plant material. MATERIALS AND METHODS The plant material (0.05, accurate weight) was placed into a 2 ml vial where the internal standard and 0.6 ml of the solvent (methylene chloride) were added. Tridecane (50 μg per a plant material sample) was used as an internal standard. The sample was held in an ultrasound extractor at temperature 50°C for 3 h, or for 24 h at room temperature [10]. The obtained extract was placed into a 2 ml vial and then concentrated by purging (100 ml/min) with highly purified nitrogen to the residual volume of the extract of 10 μl. The sample (3 μl) was injected into a chromatographic column in a splitless mode which allows to inject the sample without losses on the split and considerably increase the sensitivity of the chromatography method (up to 10-20 times). The Agilent Technologies 6890 chromatograph with mass-spectrometric detector 5973 was used. The chromatography parameters were the following: chromatographic column DB-5 capillary, inner diameter (0.25 mm), length (30 m); speed of the gas-carrier (helium) (1.2 ml/min); temperature of the sample injection heater (350°C), the thermostat temperature was programmed from 50°C-320°C with the speed 4°/min. The mass-spectra libraries NIST05 and WILEY 2007 were used for the identification of components, with total number of spectra over 470000 combined with the identification software AMDIS and NIST. The internal standard method was used for quantitative calculations. The content of the components was calculated using a formula: