Abstract

COMPARATIVE STUDIES ON PROXIMATE ANALYSIS AND AMINO ACID COMPOSITION OF LEAF AND FLOWER PROTEINS CONDUCTED ON MEDICINAL PLANT, CATHARANTHUS ROSEUS, AVAILABLE IN BANGLADESH

Shahin Aziz*, Koushik Saha, Nasim Sultana, Nazim Uddin Ahmed, Ruhul Amin, Abdullah Al-Mansur

Abstract

Bangladesh is a rich store house of medicinal plants. Catharanthus roseus is administered as a cooling medicine. It is used for the treatment of diabetes, cancer, fever, malaria, cancer, throat infection and chest complaints. Taking all these things into consideration, it creates sufficient interest to carry out proximate analysis and amino acid compositions of leaf and flower protein of Catharanthus roseus from Bangladesh. The results of the proximate analysis showed that the leaves of C. roseus have high crude fiber (48.04%), carbohydrate (43.08%) and high protein content (8.08%) than flowers of C. roseus. The ash content for leaves is (15.21%) and for flowers is (8.37%). A total of 19 amino acid compositions were found for both leaves and flowers by amino acid analyzer of the dry powder of which eight are essential and nine are non-essential amino acids. Glycine (12.983 g/100 g), Arginine (3.612 g/100 g), Histidin (1.455 g/100 g), Methionine (1.201 g/100 g) and Glutamic acid (1.112 g/100 g) were found the most predominant amino acids in the analyzed sample of dry powder of leaves whereas Alanine (4.910 g/100 g protein) and Histidin (2.129 g/100 g protein) content were found the most predominant amino acids for the case of flowers of C. roseus. The non-essential amino acid contained the highest for leaves (19.233 g/100 g protein) than the essential (6.248 g/100 g protein). And for flowers the non essential amino acid content contained the higher values (7.632 g/100 g protein) and essential amino acid content (4.769 g/100 g protein). The outcome of the study suggests that the leaf and flower of the plant have very good medicinal potentials, meet the standard requirements for drug formulations.

Keywords: Catharanthus roseus, Proximate analysis, protein, Amino acids, essential amino acids, non-essential amino acids.