PHARMACOGNOSTICAL, PHYTOCHEMICAL, HPTLC AND ETHANO-BOTANICAL STUDY OF BAUHINIA PURPUREA L. POD

Background: Bauhinia purpurea L. is a flowering plant belongs to family Leguminosae, also known as purple orchid plant. All parts of this plant including leaves, stem bark, flower and pods are edible and used for various medicinal purposes. Detailed pharmacognostic profiling of various parts has been performed except plant Pod, thus pod was selected for this study. Objective: The purpose of this work was to enrich the research on B. purpurea L. Pod in respect of pharmacognostical, physicochemical, qualitative identification of secondary metabolites by HPTLC and ethno-botanical profiling. Material and Methods: Entire pod and powder were subject to macro and microscopic study, different physico-chemical parameters including ash, extractive, moisture and pH determined through standard methods with analytical grade chemical and standard equipments. Quantitative estimation of phenolic content was performed by well-known Folin-Ciocalteu method and HPTLC developed through Vision cat software. Result: Fresh pod is green, elongated with sub-orbicular seeds. TS show different parenchymatous arrangement with yellow brown tannin content and Ca-oxalate crystals. Alkaloids, tannin, phenolic and flavonoids were reported in the hydro-methanolic extract through phytochemical screening.  Consequently, total phenol and flavonoid were found to be 490.62mg/g and 235.28 mg/g, respectively. Moreover, in HPTLC, R_f values of tested extract were reported between 0.2 to 0.72. Conclusion: Reported Ethano-botanical values of different parts of this plant were denoted the range of its therapeutic importance in indifferent tribal races. B. purpurea L. is a medicinal remedy generally known as Orchid tree. Based on our research pod of this plant has phyto-constituents including alkaloids, phenols and tannins responsible for therapeutic values. Subsequently, HPTLC of hydro-methanolic extract also proved the presence of different compounds which might be support the ethano-botanical utilization of this part of plant. Hence this study would be assist for the identification, standardization of plant pod collected from various geographical area and suppliers in the authentication.