Elsevier

Phytochemistry

Volume 56, Issue 4, February 2001, Pages 359-361
Phytochemistry

Anthocyanins from red flower tea (Benibana-cha), Camellia sinensis

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0031-9422(00)00359-9Get rights and content

Abstract

Three anthocyanins were isolated from the leaves of red flower tea (Benibana-cha), Camellia sinensis, and their structures were determined by means of chemical and spectroscopic analyses. Two are the anthocyanins, delphinidin and cyanidin 3-O-β-d-galactosides, respectively. Whereas the third, delphinidin 3-O-β-d-(6-(E)-p-coumaryl)galactopyranoside. The anthocyanins were also contained in the flowers of Benibana-cha in different compositions.

Introduction

Benibana-cha, originally grown in China, is a unique tea tree (Camellia sinensis) having red flowers and reddish green leaves. The red color is attributed to anthocyanin pigments contained in the plant. Thus the extract of Benibana-cha leaf is expected to contain highly bioactive substances, because it contains antioxidative anthocyanins (Tsuda et al., 1996, Noda et al., 1998, Obi et al., 1998) in addition to multi-biological functional catechins (Guo et al., 1996, Nanjo et al., 1996, Kumamoto and Sonda, 1998, Kondo et al., 1999) which are normal green tea constituents. Since the anthocyanins had not yet been investigated, their structures were investigated using chemical and spectroscopic methods.

Section snippets

Results and discussion

From the leaves of Benibana-cha, we extracted the crude pigment which contained twelve or more Benibana-cha leaf anthocyanins (BCL-1 to 12). On purification of the crude extracts through several types of column chromatography, three anthocyanins 1, 2 and 3 were isolated as powders of trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) salts. On acid hydrolysis, 1 and 3 gave delphinidin (Dp), and 2 gave cyanidin (Cy) as aglycon, and all gave only galactose as the sugar by TLC analysis. On alkaline hydrolysis, 3 gave p

General experimental procedures

All reagents used were special or HPLC grades purchased from Kishida Chemical Co. and Wako Chemical Ind., Japan. TLC was carried out as previously reported (Terahara et al., 1992). HPLC was done on an L-6200 Intelligent pump system (Hitachi Co., Japan). The analytical HPLC was run on a Luna column (4.5 i.d.×150 mm, Phenomenex Co., USA) at 35°C with monitoring at 520 nm. The flow rate was 1.0 ml min−1 with a linear gradient elution for 80 min from 0% to 40% solvent B (1.5% H3PO4, 20% HOAc, 25%

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