I'm working on aqueous extract of leaves of a medicinal plant. after maceration, can I use filtrate for biochemical tests and TLC etc or do I absolutely have to do rotary evaporation first?
Rota evaporator only helps to concentrate your bio-active extracted molecules present in your medicinal plant. Hence, its quite beneficial to detect the single molecules exhibited in a extremely low quantity. Secondly, u have to lyophilize your extract after rota-eva. so that further analysis can be done without deteriorating the bioactives present in your extract.
In addition answer above mentioned by Dadwal, you can use it to evaporate solvent at low temperature protecting thermal unstable compound. However, If you want evaporate water using a rotary evaporation, you have to cool the solvent collecting vessels (using Ice) while maintaining, temperature of plant extract around 30-40 degrees of Celsius (but you have to be careful about the temperature). Since water is a polar solvent, it will take relative longer time to evaporate it
However if, your target compounds are highly volatile , you have to think about other extraction method.
Thank you Dr Vikas Dadwal and Dr. A. G. Piyal Aravinna for your insights.
Dr. Shibabrata Pattanayak my project is based on using the parts of plants that have high quantities of antioxidant and anti-inflammatory metabolites. for some plants its the leaves, for some its the roots and bark and so on. Currently im working on leaves.
I am agreed with Dr. Shibabrata Pattanayak , metabolites extraction of medicinal plant is different from others and its starts deteriorate from the time of plucking. Hence, people used to put it directly into liquid nitrogen without wasting too much time. And then crush it in lab for further analysis without drying or something. Medicinal plants metabolites are highly susceptible to light intensity, high temperature, pH even time. So, its better to made extraction from the fresh ones or use SUCCULENT leaves as advised.
Dr Vikas Dadwal are you suggesting that I eliminate the air drying step completely? If you have protocol for extraction from fresh plant material, I'd be happy to try it in my lab.