Separation of Methanolic Leaf Extracts of Three Rutaceous Plants by Capillary Electrophoresis and High-Performance Liquid Chromatography Methods

Introduction: In the phytochemical analysis of various multi component mixtures, Capillary electrophoresis (CE) method was considered as the best alternative tool due to high efficiency resolution separations, low solvent consumption and less maintenance costs. Materials and Methods: This study uses CE and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) methods to evaluate the major components of methanolic leaf extract of Rutaceous plants. And also, to assess the purity of the components in isolated fractions and most importantly for the qualitative identification of the individual components of extracts based upon the relative retention time and UV profile. Results: The separation of the compounds in HPLC was attained by using ACE-5-C₁₈ (250 x 4.6 mm) with a flow rate of 1.5 ml/min, with the UV detection at 254 nm and CE was equipped with a UV diode-array detector and bare, fused silica capillaries (56 cm 50 μm) with micro extended light path were used for the separations. Conclusion: Our study reveals that CE technique is a simple, economical and convenient method and shown high-resolution for multi-components found in plant extracts compared with HPLC profiles.