Hindawi Publishing Corporation Chromatography Research International Volume 2012, Article ID 691509, 7 pages doi:10.1155/2012/691509 Research Article CZE/PAD and HPLC-UV/PAD Profile of Flavonoids from Maytenus aquifolium and Maytenus ilicifolia “espinheira santa” Leaves Extracts Cristina A. Diagone, Renata Colombo, Fernando M. Lanc ¸as, and Janete H. Yariwake Instituto de Qu´ ımica de S˜ ao Carlos, Universidade de S˜ ao Paulo, Caixa Postal 780, 13560-970 S˜ ao Carlos, SP, Brazil Correspondence should be addressed to Janete H. Yariwake, janete@iqsc.usp.br Received 22 June 2011; Accepted 9 October 2011 Academic Editor: Irena Vovk Copyright © 2012 Cristina A. Diagone 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. This paper describes the application of HPLC and CZE to analyze flavonoids in the leaves of Maytenus ilicifolia and Maytenus aquifolium, which are species widely used in Brazilian folk medicine. The two species showed different flavonoid profiles, but acidic hydrolysis of the Maytenus extracts confirmed that all these compounds are quercetin or kaempferol derivatives. A comparison of the CZE and HPLC profiles of Maytenus extracts showed numerous flavonoid peaks using HPLC. However, the advantages of CZE such as analysis without requiring clean-up and less generation of chemical waste than with HPLC point to the potential of the CZE technique for the quality control (routine analysis) of “espinheira santa” phytopharmaceuticals. 1. Introduction Flavonoids are a heterogeneous group of polyphenols (about 4000 substances) present in all plants and responsible for their color, growth, development, and immunity [1, 2] and can occur in free form (aglycones) or linked to sugars (gly- cosides) [3]. Many flavonoids found in plants have biological and pharmacological activities, such as antimicrobial, anti- inflammatory, and antiallergic action [4–7]. The antioxidant property of these substances has also been established and correlated to their protective effects on cardiovascular disease and some forms of cancer [8–10]. Maytenus ilicifolia and M. aquifolium (Celastraceae) are Brazilian medicinal plants known as “espinheira santa”, which are used in Brazil as phytopharmaceuticals due to their antiulcer activity [11, 12]. Several studies focus on the bioac- tivity of Maytenus extracts, whose main compounds include flavonoid derivatives of quercetin and kaempferol [13, 14] and tannins [15]. These polyphenolic compounds can be correlated with the diverse pharmacological activities of these extracts [16, 17]. Due to the structural characteristics of polyphenolic compounds, most of the procedures described in the literature for the analysis of M. aquifolium and M. ilicifolia extract are based on RP-HPLC (reverse-phase high-performance liquid chromatography). Recently, how- ever, a two-dimensional LC (size-exclusion—reverse-phase) procedure was employed for the LC-MS analysis of flavonol glycosides from M. ilicifolia leaves [18]. Due to its robustness, sensitivity, and versatility, HPLC- UV/PAD (high performance liquid chromatography-ultra- violet detection using a photodiode array detector) is the technique of choice for the analysis of flavonoids and other phenolic compounds in natural products [19, 20]. However, more recently, CE (capillary electrophoresis) techniques, in- cluding CZE (capillary zone electrophoresis), have been int- roduced as an analytical tool in studies of many secondary plant metabolites, mainly due to the method’s faster devel- opment, lower operating cost and solvent consumption, and higher separation efficiencies [19, 21]. This work compares the HPLC and CZE techniques ap- plied in the analysis of flavonoids contained in these two Maytenus species. Analytical methods for these two species that are suitable for application in agronomic studies or the quality control of phytopharmaceuticals, for example, re- quire numerous analyses. In the development of these analy- tical methods, one must also keep in mind that the two