How can I calculate the dose of a juice of a plant for the pharmacological assay?
Why? The answer depends. Most juices are 'sweet' so you can perform a sugar analysis by HPLC or a reduction of Cupric Sulphate (Fehling reaction).
An important thing to remember when preparing extracts, such as the juice of a plant, for pharmacological experiments, is to maintain consistency in every way. If there is a pharmacologically active substance in the extract, the dose of it may vary depending upon many factors, such as the conditions under which the plant was grown, how it was stored after being harvested, how long it was stored, the method used to extract it, how the extract was stored, and how old the extract is.
If you know what the active ingredient is and have a way to measure it, then you should measure its concentration in each extract preparation and calculate the dose based on the amount of the active substance. This reduces the necessity of assuring reproducibility of the extract as discussed above.
If you don't have this knowledge or capability, then the consistency issue becomes of paramount importance. Once a consistent supply is established, the dose could be calculated based on the volume of the juice, or the dry weight of the juice, or the dry weight of the plant material used to prepare the juice, etc. If administered to an animal, the treatment should be normalized to the body weight of the animal, as in ml/kg or mg/kg.
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