Cytotoxic Flavonoid from Achillea talagonica Bioss.

Achillea talagonica (asteraceae) is an endemic herbaceous plant in iranwith small yellow flowers and several times pinnately divided leaves in worm shape. theplant was found to be cytotoxic in our previous studies.materials and methods: a. talagonica was collected in may 2005 from talegan innorth of iran during the full flowering stage. dried aerial parts of the plant were reducedin to small pieces and percolated with ethyl acetate for 72 hours. the extract obtainedwas filtered and then concentrated under reduced pressure and completely dried by afreeze dryer. column chromatography of the extract on silica gel and sephadex lh-20yielded in isolation of three main components. cytotoxic activity was evaluated againstthe artemia salina larvae by the brine shrimp cytotoxicity bioassay.results: isolated compounds were identified as â-sitosterol (1), salvigenin (5- hydroxy 4',6, 7- three methoxy flavone) (2) and santoflavon (5- hydroxy 4', 3', 6, 7- tetra methoxyflavone) (3). nmr data of all the isolated compounds showed good agreement withliterature data.conclusions: in our previous studies ethyl acetate extract of a. talagonica showedcytotoxic activity in brine shrimp lethality assay. the results of bst assay indicated thatonly santoflavone (3) showed a good cytotoxic activity (lc50 = 15 ىg/ml) against a. salinalarvae so this compound seems to be responsible for the extract toxicity of a. talagonicaagainst artemia nauplii.