Water-Based Extraction of Bioactive Principles from Blackcurrant Leaves and Chrysanthellum americanum: A Comparative Study

The water-based extraction of bioactive components from flavonoid-rich medicinal plants is a key step that should be better investigated. This is especially true when dealing with easy-to-use home-made conditions of extractions, which are known to be a bottleneck in the course for a better control and optimization of the daily uptake of active components from medicinal plants. In this work, the water-based extraction of Blackcurrant (Ribes nigrum) leaves (BC) and Chrysanthellum americanum (CA), known to have complementary pharmacological properties, was studied and compared with a previous work performed on the extraction of Hawthorn (Crataegus, HAW). Various extraction modes in water (infusion, percolation, maceration, ultrasounds, microwaves) were compared for the extraction of bioactive principles contained in BC and CA in terms of extraction yield, of amount of flavonoids, phenolic compounds, and proanthocyanidin oligomers, and of UHPLC profiles of the extracted compounds. The qualitative and quantitative aspects of the extraction, in addition to the kinetic of extraction, were studied. The optimized easy-to-use-at-home extraction protocol developed for HAW was found very efficient to easily extract bioactive components from BC and CA plants. UHPLC-ESI-MS and high-resolution Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FT-ICR MS) were also implemented to get more qualitative information on the specific and common chemical compositions of the three plants (including HAW). Their antihyaluronidase, antioxidant, and antihypertensive activities were also determined and compared, demonstrating similar activities as the reference compound for some of these plants.