Determination of the active principles of Catha Edulis: Quali–quantitative analysis of cathinone, cathine, and phenylpropanolamine

Capillary electrophoretic and extraction conditions for the analysis of Catha edulis FORKS active principles

“…This finding confirmed what was reported in the literature [11,15]. In the woody stems only low amounts of cathinone were found confirming the hypothesis that the most active alkaloid is enzymatically converted into cathine and PPA in the older parts of the plant ( Table 1).…”

“…The drying of the vegetable material was then taken into account to confirm what was found in the study on the determination of the alkaloids of C. edulis by GC [15]. Three samples of frozen leaves and stems were dried in a heater at 35 8C and weighted every hour to determine the loss on drying, which As a result, a sample of dried leaves and stems was extracted following the optimized extraction protocol and compared with the extraction of a sample of frozen vegetable material.…”

“…In the electrophoretic conditions, basic substances migrates faster than neutral or acidic compounds, so it was possible to separate the three main basic active principles contained in khat from the other components of the vegetable matrix in a short time. This means that this technique is much more selective than other methods such as GC or HPLC in which more complex chromatograms are obtained [15], moreover no derivatization procedures are required. In order to quantify the active principles and to minimize the EOF variations, an internal standard (IS) was sought, whose time of migration and electrophoretic characteristics were compatible with those of the analytes of interest.…”

“…From the electropherograms of the extractions carried out with these three solvents it was evident that only methanol was able to extract in an efficient way the active principles. In a previous paper [15] we reported as optimal conditions for the extraction of the analytes a liquid-liquid extraction with ethyl acetate. In this case we decided to macerate the vegetable material with pure organic solvents in order to simplify the extraction protocol and to avoid the phase separation step and the evaporation of the solvent.…”

“…Several analytical methods were developed for the determination of khat alkaloids either involving GC and HPLC techniques [10][11][12][13][14]; in the last years, the Tribunal of Busto Arsizio and Bergamo gave us the task to analyze all the materials suspected to contain khat active principles, coming from the seizures at the Malpensa and Orio al Serio airports in northern Italy. Thus, due to the high number of samples to be analyzed, we developed a fast, effective and reliable GC analytical procedure able to simultaneously detect, cathine and PPA, whose discrimination was mandatory because PPA is not a controlled psychoactive agent, exploiting a derivatization protocol which allowed an effective separation of the two components without dramatically increasing the time of analyses [15].…”