SUPERCRITICAL-FLUID EXTRACTION AND BIOASSAY IDENTIFICATION OF PRODRUGSUBSTANCES FROM NATURAL-RESOURCES

For arbitrarily chosen thirty types of natural resources which have be en widely used in oriental traditional herb medicine, supercritical CO 2 extraction (SFE) and organic liquid solvent extraction (LSE) with n- hexane, chloroform and methanol were carried out to extract pharmaceut ical substances. To evaluate relative advantages and shortcomings betw een the SFE and LSE, five types of bioactivity assays as well as gas- and thin layer-chromatographic analysis were performed for all the ext racts obtained by the two extraction methods. Types of bioassays perfo rmed included cytotoxicity, bleb forming, DNA binding, oxygen fee radi cal scavenger and Xanthine oxidase inhibitor tests. To evaluate econom ic viability of the SFE over the traditional LSE, extractability of pr odrug substances was evaluated as the functions of extraction temperat ure and pressure. SFE was proven to be a feasible alternative over LSE . Also, the optimum SFE conditions which provided maximum extraction a nd cytotoxicity for each selected sample were presented.