Commercially Available Products Obtained from Various Piper Species

Plant-, animal- and mineral-based medicines used singularly or in combination are the basis of Ayurvedic or traditional medical practices. More than 30 dosage forms are usually prescribed by Ayurvedic physicians. Churna, vati, gutika, awaleha, asvas-arishtas, ghritas and tilas are some of the dosage forms. In earlier days, the physicians themselves used to handle the preparation of formulations, but now, they depend on the marketed products manufactured by Ayurvedic pharmacies. Trikatu, a Sanskrit word meaning three acrids, is an Ayurvedic preparation of P. nigrum, P. longam and Z. officinalis. According to the Handbook of Domestic Medicine and Common Ayurvedic Remedies, 370 listed formulations contain either trikatu or its individual ingredients (Majumdar et al. 1978). Various formulations containing Piper species available as commercial products are listed in Table 1.4.

Phytochemical Analysis

The fruits, seeds, leaves, branches, roots and stems of Piper plants are rich in essential oils (Mgbeahuruike et al. 2017). Essential oils from Piper species have been analyzed by GC and GC-MS (Martins et al. 1998; Liu et al. 2007). Eighty compounds were profiled from ten Piper species cultivated in Hainan Island, China, after headspace-solid-phase microextraction (HS-SPME) with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) (Hao et al. 2018). Besides essential oils, Piper species also contain other polar constituents, and hence, HPTLC and HPLC methods have been used for the identification and quantification of constituents from the genus Piper (Variyar and Bandyopadhyay 1994; Hamrapurkar et al. 2011; Wood et al. 1988; Hazra et al. 2018; Rajopadhye et al. 2011; Rao et al. 2011; Kamal et al. 2016). LC-MS has also been used extensively for the qualitative and quantitative determinations of the phytoconstituents of Piper species (Friedman et al. 2008; Scott et al. 2005a,b; Kikuzaki et al. 1993; Gu et al. 2018; Sruthi and Zachariah et al. 2010, 2016; Sun et al. 2007). Direct analysis in real time-mass spectrometry (DART-MS), an ambient ionization mass spectrometry technique, can analyze materials in their native form (solids, liquids or gases) eliminating the need for sample

TABLE 1.4 Various Products Available in the Market Obtained from Piper Species

TABLE 1.4 (Continued) Various Products Available in the Market Obtained from Piper Species

TABLE 1.4 (Continued) Various Products Available in the Market Obtained from Piper Species

preparation (Cody et al. 2005). Psychoactive Piper species, P. methysticum and P. betle, have been examined by DART-MS fingerprinting followed by chemometric analysis leading to the differentiation and identification of these two species (Lesiak et al. 2016).

Standardization is a critical step in herbal medicine as it checks variations of phytoconstituents and ensures consistency in the quality of herbal products (Casazza et al. 2011; Kim et al. 2011; Heinrich et al. 2012). Continuing our work on Indian medicinal plants and their bioactivities, we have carried out phytochemical analysis of a number of Piper species. Metabolic profiling of Piper species (P. nigrum, P. longum and P. chaba) was carried out using DART-MS (Bajpai et al. 2010, 2012; Chandra et al. 2014). Quantitative determination and comparative analysis of the phytoconstituents were carried out in different plant parts (fruits and leaves) of ten Piper species using UPLC- ESI-MS/MS (Chandra et al. 2015).