Phytochemicals: Extraction methods, identification and detection of bioactive compounds from plant extracts

Abstract

Plants are recognized in the pharmaceutical industry due to their broad spectrum of structural diversity and their wide range of pharmacological activities. The biological active compounds that are present in plants referred as phytochemicals. These phytochemicals derived from different parts of plants such as leaves, barks, seed, seed coat, flowers, roots and pulps and thereby used as sources of direct medicinal agents. Phytochemistry describes the large number of secondary metabolic compounds present in the plants. The plants are the reservoirs of naturally occurring chemical compounds and of structurally diverse bioactive molecules. The extraction of bioactive compounds from the plants and their quantitative and qualitative estimation is important for exploration of new biomolecules to be used by pharmaceutical and agrochemical industry directly or can be used as a lead molecule to synthesize more potent molecules. This review mostly highlighted on the analytical methodologies, which includes the extraction methods and the analysis of bioactive compounds present in the plant extracts through the various techniques involving the applications of chromatographic techniques such as HPLC (High Performance Liquid Chromatography), TLC (Thin Layer Chromatography), HPTLC (High Performance Thin Layer Chromatography), OPLC (Optimum Performance Laminar Chromatography), GC (Gas Chromatography), PC (Paper Chromatography), CC (Column Chromatography) and it’s detection through Fourier Transform Infra-Red spectroscopy (FTIR), Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), and Mass Spectrometry (MS).