Quantitative Estimation of Piperine and Diosgenin in Ayurvedic formulation

Goksuradi guggulu is a polyherbal formulation official in “Ayurvedic formulary of India” and used for dysuria, urinary obstruction, increased frequency and turbidity of urine, calculus, excessive vaginal discharge, gout. A simple, specific and precise high performance thin-layer chromatography (HPTLC) method has been developed for quantification of piperine and diosgenin in Goksuradi guggulu. We report the extraction and estimation of these compounds in a laboratory prepared sample of Goksuradi guggulu and two of its marketed formulations. The compounds were chromatographed on precoated silica gel G 60 254 plates in the mobile phase comprising of toluene: hexane: ethyl acetate (6.8:0.2:3). Under the optimized chromatographic conditions, the calibration plot was found to be linear in the range of 0.2-1µg spot-1 for piperine and 1.0 -3.0 µg spot-1 for diosgenin. The correlation coefficient (R2) was 0.9979 and 0.9915 for piperine and diosgenin respectively. Mean recovery (% w/w) for piperine in all the formulations was in the range of 97.61 - 98.90 and for diosgenin, it was 93.76 - 94.33.