Box-Behnken Design (BBD)-Based Optimization of Microwave-Assisted Extraction of Parthenolide from the Stems of Tarconanthus camphoratus and Cytotoxic Analysis

• Published in: Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 26; no. 7; p. 1876
• Main Authors: Alam, Perwez, Siddiqui, Nasir Ali, Rehman, Md Tabish, Hussain, Afzal, Akhtar, Ali, Mir, Showkat R, Alajmi, Mohamed Fahad
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 26-03-2021; MDPI
• Subjects: Box–Behnken design; Cancer; Cell lines; Chromatography; Coefficient of variation; Cytotoxicity; Design optimization; Herbal medicine; HPTLC analysis; Methods; Noise prediction; Optimization; parthenolide; Polynomials; Quantitative analysis; Signal to noise ratio; Solvents; T. camphoratus; Thin layer chromatography; Variables; Saudi Arabia; United States > US; Switzerland; HPTLC analysis; Box–Behnken design; parthenolide; T. camphoratus; cytotoxicity
• ISSN: 1420-3049; 1420-3049
• DOI: 10.3390/molecules26071876

Parthenolide, a strong cytotoxic compound found in different parts of
which motivated the authors to develop an optimized microwave-assisted extraction (MEA) method using Box-Behnken design (BBD) for efficient extraction of parthenolide from the stem of
and its validation by high-performance thin-layer chromatography (HPTLC) and cytotoxic analysis. The optimized parameters for microwave extraction were determined as: 51.5 °C extraction temperature, 50.8 min extraction time, and 211 W microwave power. A quadratic polynomial model was found the most suitable model with
of 0.9989 and coefficient of variation (CV) of 0.2898%. The high values of adjusted
(0.9974), predicted
(0.9945), and signal-to-noise ratio (74.23) indicated a good correlation and adequate signal, respectively. HPTLC analyzed the parthenolide (R
= 0.16) content in
methanol extract (TCME) at λ
= 575 nm and found it as 0.9273% ± 0.0487%
/
, which was a higher than expected yield (0.9157%
/
). The TCME exhibited good cytotoxicity against HepG2 and MCF-7 cell lines (IC
= 30.87 and 35.41 µg/mL, respectively), which further supported our findings of high parthenolide content in TCME. This optimized MAE method can be further applied to efficiently extract parthenolide from marketed herbal supplements containing different
species.