RESEARCH ARTICLE
Monitoring by HPLC of Chamomile Flavonoids Exposed to Rat Liver Microsomal Metabolism
Georg Petroianu1, Éva Szőke2, Huba Kalász3, Péter Szegi4, Rudolf Laufer3, Bernadett Benkő5, Ferenc Darvas6, Kornélia Tekes*, 4
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2009Volume: 3
First Page: 1
Last Page: 7
Publisher ID: TOMCJ-3-1
DOI: 10.2174/1874104500903010001
Article History:
Received Date: 23/3/2009Revision Received Date: 8/5/2009
Acceptance Date: 17/5/2009
Electronic publication date: 29/7/2009
Collection year: 2009

open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
Three major flavonoid chamomile components (quercetin, apigenin-7-O-glucoside and rutin) were subjected to oxidative metabolism by cytochrome P-450 of rat liver microsomal preparations. Changes over time in their respective concentrations were followed using reversed-phase HPLC with UV detection. No clean-up had to be applied as only the specific flavonoid had to be separated from the background components originating from the rat liver microsome.
Neither the concentration of apigenin-7-O-glucoside nor that of the diglycoside rutin decreased during one hour of exposure to rat microsomal treatment. In contrast, the concentration of quercetin, a lipophilic aglycon, decreased.
Our analytical HPLC results complement the in silico calculated lipophilicity (logP) of these compounds; the relatively high lipophilicity of quercetin appears to predispose it to oxidative metabolism in order to decrease its fat solubility. In contrast the much less lipophilic compounds apigenin-7-O-glucoside and rutin were resistant in vitro to microsomal treatment.