Abstract

GENERAL TECHNIQUES OF EXTRACTION OF ACTIVE CONSTITUENTS IN HERBAL DRUGS

Jeenu Joseph*, Girisa Chandran

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Abstract

Medicinal plants provide unlimited opportunities for new leads due to their innumerable chemical diversity. Extraction is the initial step to separate the desired natural products from the raw materials. Extraction methods include solvent extraction, distillation method, pressing and sublimation according to the extraction principle. The conventional extraction methods, including maceration, percolation and reflux extraction, usually use organic solvents and require a large volume of solvents and long extraction time. Some modern or greener extraction methods such as super critical fluid extraction (SFC), pressurized liquid extraction (PLE) and microwave assisted extraction (MAE), have also been applied in natural products extraction.

Keywords: maceration, percolation, super critical fluid extraction (SFC), pressurized liquid extraction (PLE), microwave assisted extraction (MAE).