Chemical constituents and free radical scavenging activity of corn pollen collected from Apis mellifera hives compared to floral corn pollen at Nan, Thailand

BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Research Article

Chanpen Chanchao¹  Preecha Phuwapraisirisan²  Masayuki Okuyama³  Atsuo Kimura³  Haruhide Mori³  Kiyoshi Kimura⁴  Atip Chantarudee⁵ 

[1] Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University, 254 Phayathai Road, 10330, Bangkok, Thailand;Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University, 254 Phayathai Road, 10330, Bangkok, Thailand;Division of Applied Bioscience, Graduate School of Agriculture, Hokkaido University, 060-8589, Sapporo, Japan;Honeybee Research Group, National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science, 305-0901, Ibaraki, Japan;Program of Biotechnology, Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University, 254 Phayathai Road, 10330, Bangkok, Thailand;

关键词: Apis mellifera;    Bee corn pollen;    Floral corn pollen;    DPPH;    Free radical scavenging activity;    Nutritional components;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1472-6882-12-45

 received in 2011-12-30, accepted in 2012-04-18,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundBee pollen is composed of floral pollen mixed with nectar and bee secretion that is collected by foraging honey (Apis sp.) and stingless bees. It is rich in nutrients, such as sugars, proteins, lipids, vitamins and flavonoids, and has been ascribed antiproliferative, anti-allergenic, anti-angiogenic and free radical scavenging activities. This research aimed at a preliminary investigation of the chemical constituents and free radical scavenging activity in A. mellifera bee pollen.MethodsBee pollen was directly collected from A. mellifera colonies in Nan province, Thailand, in June, 2010, whilst floral corn (Zea mays L.) pollen was collected from the nearby corn fields. The pollen was then sequentially extracted with methanol, dichloromethane (DCM) and hexane, and each crude extract was tested for free radical scavenging activity using the DPPH assay, evaluating the percentage scavenging activity and the effective concentration at 50% (EC50). The most active crude fraction from the bee pollen was then further enriched for bioactive components by silica gel 60 quick and adsorption or Sephadex LH-20 size exclusion chromatography. The purity of all fractions in each step was observed by thin layer chromatography and the bioactivity assessed by the DPPH assay. The chemical structures of the most active fractions were analyzed by nuclear magnetic resonance.ResultsThe crude DCM extract of both the bee corn pollen and floral corn pollen provided the highest active free radical scavenging activity of the three solvent extracts, but it was significantly (over 28-fold) higher in the bee corn pollen (EC50 = 7.42 ± 0.12 μg/ml), than the floral corn pollen (EC50 = 212 ± 13.6% μg/ml). After fractionation to homogeneity, the phenolic hydroquinone and the flavone 7-O-R-apigenin were found as the minor and major bioactive compounds, respectively. Bee corn pollen contained a reasonably diverse array of nutritional components, including biotin (56.7 μg/100 g), invert sugar (19.9 g/100 g), vitamin A and β carotene (1.53 mg/100 g).ConclusionsBee pollen derived from corn (Z. mays), a non-toxic or edible plant, provided a better free radical scavenging activity than floral corn pollen.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.