Isolation and Antimicrobial Activity of Coumarin Derivatives from Fruits of Peucedanum luxurians Tamamsch

Abstract

As a continuation of searching for phytoconstituents that act as promising agents for antimicrobial therapy, rare coumarins were isolated from fruits of <i>Peucedanum luxurians</i> and tested. In a first step, the content of major compounds in the aerial parts and fruits of <i>P. luxurians</i> were compared. The results clearly showed that the fruits with dichloromethane as a solvent yielded, in most cases, higher concentrations of almost all the analyzed coumarins than the aerial parts, with peucedanin detected as the most abundant compound with a concentration of 4563.94 ± 3.35 mg/100 g. Under this perspective, the dichloromethane extract from the fruits of <i>P. luxurians</i> was further submitted to high performance countercurrent chromatography with a mixture of <i>n</i>-hexane, ethyl acetate, methanol, and water 6:5:6:5 (<i>v</i>/<i>v</i>). Combination of HPCCC and prep-HPLC yielded 6',7'-dihydroxybergamottin (<b>1</b>), officinalin (<b>2</b>), stenocarpin isobutyrate (<b>3</b>), officinalin isobutyrate (<b>4</b>), 8-methoxypeucedanin (<b>5</b>), and peucedanin (<b>6</b>). Isolated compounds were tested against several Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria strains. 6',7'-Dihydroxybergamottin, peucedanin, and officinalin isobutyrate appeared to be the most active against all tested bacteria strains with minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) values between 1.20 and 4.80 mg/mL. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report about countercurrent isolation of mentioned coumarins, as well as the first information about their antimicrobial activity.