Wild edible fruit crop Haematocarpus validus (Miers) Bakh.f. ex Forman (Khoon phal): a novel source of nutraceuticals

Abstract

Bioprospecting of underexplored plants opens up new avenues for developing value added products, ready-to-use herbal formulations and nutraceuticals. This study investigates the volatile metabolome and mineral composition of Haematocarpus validus (Khoon phal), an ethnic fruit crop of tropical Asia. H. validus is used for curing hepatic diseases, anemic and inflammatory conditions in ethnic medicine. Analysis of EI mass spectra on GC–MS platform detected 54 and 48 compounds from fruit and leaf extract respectively. Quinic acid (a hepato-protectant) predominates among volatiles in fruit (29.13%) and unsaturated fatty acids in leaf (61%). Through HP-TLC spectrodensitometric study, quinic acid was quantified as 292.95 mg/100 g dry weight. Five macroelements and 17 microelements were analyzed using ICP–AES and ICP–MS respectively. H. validus fruit has very high K/Na ratio (280.65) and both fruit and leaf are rich in Fe content (57.29 and 38.44 mg/100 g dry weight respectively). High unsaturated fatty acid/ saturated fatty acid ratio and abundance of linoleic acid (55.54% of total fatty acids) in leaf along with relatively high content of conjugated linoleic acid suggest its potential usefulness in pharmaceutical and nutraceutical industry. This is the first report on volatile metabolome of H. validus fruit and leaf.