Abstract

Many plant derived molecules have shown a promising effect in therapeutics. Among the plants investigated to date, one showing enormous potential is the Piperaceae. Piperine is an alkaloid found naturally in plants belonging to the pyridine group of Piperaceae family, such as Piper nigrum and Piper longum. It is widely used in various herbal cough syrups and it is also used in anti inflammatory, anti malarial, anti leukemia treatment. So the present study was aimed to extract the phytochemical compounds in different solvent system in P.longum, P. nigrum and Piper cubeba. In preliminary screening and confirmatory test it was identified as alkaloid. The methanol extract of P. nigrum, P. longumand ethanol extract of P. nigrum and ethyl acetate extract of P. cubeba showed good result in TLC so these extracts were taken for HPTLC analysis. In HPTLC analysis of P. nigrum sample showed six alkaloid bands, two alkaloid bands were similar to Piperine standard 1 and 2, the other alkaloid may be piperidine, piperettine and piperanine. In P. longum sample contain three alkaloid bands one band was similar to Piperine standard 1, the other may be piperlongumine and piperlonguminine and no alkaloid band was found in P. cubeba. The anti bacterial was tested against gram positive and negative organism using agar well diffusion method. High activity was found in P. nigrum ethanol extract against the organismSalmonella typii. The alkaloid piperdine was purified by refluxion method to check the antitumour activity which shows 51.38% of inhibition at 5 µg/ml concentration that conforms the compound piperidine to be used as anticancer drug for further mechanistic works.

Key words: Alkaloids, piperine, HPTLC, antibacterial activity, purification, piperidine, HEp2 cell lines.