I have a plant leaf powder which is shade dried. I want to completely analyse what all the constituents present in that leaf powder are. What are the studies I should take a look at? Your suggestions, please.
try to make solutions of aquous and ethanolic extractions seperatly and go with HPLC analysis. you will get different compunds. you can identify your compound of your interest, if you have standard material. If you don't have standard fractionate the peak, and charaterise with XRD.
First of all you have to decide which kind of constituents you are looking for, whether it is protein, lipid or metabolites. Then prepare the sample accordingly and analyse by LC-MS. There are different protocols for different kind of constituents.
There are simple as well as complex instruments that can be used for the analysis of crude samples depending upon the constituents which you want to analyse. You may would be well aware about those instruments. Depending upon the polarity and non polarity of the constituents you would have to use the solvent system but first you have to make up your mind what constituents you want to analyse.
You need to decrease the complexity of your sample. For that it's better to do extractions in different solvents with different polarities to analyse every extract by GC-MS. Here is an example http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1658365513000423
But here it's missing macromolecules. So you should do some LC-MSMS or MALDI-TOFTOF too.
As several of the respondents have implied, it's essentially impossible to analyze all the components of a natural-product sample. To even begin, an analyst would need access to and experience with GC/MS and LC/MS, and probably NMR, along with skill in the associated software. There are components present at high abundance, and others present at low abundance. Polar constituents and non-polar constituents. High molecular weights and low molecular weights. Acidic components, basic components, and neutral components - each of which need to be isolated and often analyzed by different techniques. Is it important to identify the components, or also to quantitate them? Two very different aspects with differing approaches. The advice above to - at least at the beginning - simplify both the samples and the expectations is good advice.
You have to use column chromatography technique, solvent extraction, thin layer chromatography, IR, 1H NMR, 13C NMR, Mass spectrometry for complete characterization of all the constituents present in any natural producta.
hi Noorjahan...it depends on polarity, u shud start with less polar solvent and gradually increases the polarity of the solvent and in the last u can use methanol for most polar constituent
I do not realise how it is possible to make complex metabolomic analysis from dried tissue sample... As for lipidomics, your approach will not work since most of acyl chains of lipids, especially polyunsaturated like a-linolenic FA, will be destroyed by air oxygen at least. So you'd better to try another approach to sample preparation and tissue fixation for further analysis.