Bioactivity-guided isolation of Laccaic Acid-A: A potent anti-cancer agent from Laccifer lacca (Kerr)

Laccifer lacca (Kerr) (LL) has widely been used as pigmenting, dying and coloring agent in chemical industry. Although, it has wide range of industrial applications, but unfortunately, due to lesser availability of data, it has been ignored. Keeping in mind, the broad application of Laccifer lacca (Kerr), we tried to report the in vitro anti-cancer effects along with its chemical characterization. This work is divided into two sections, first section to assess the anti-cancer activity of dye of Laccifer lacca (Kerr) employing SRB assay. In second section, the active fraction was processed to isolate the active chemical entities using preparative gradient HPLC-UV. The detector was set at 275 nm and 360 nm as reference wavelength. Results of ethyl acetate fraction (EA) showed promising anti-cancer spectrum for MDA-MB-231 (<10 mu g/mL) and SiHa (<10 mu g/mL) cell lines. Furthermore, laccaic acid-A was identified from EA of Laccifer lacca. In conclusion, our results suggested being the first report for isolation of laccaic acid-A from Laccifer lacca. We characterized the isolated compound be UV, IR, NMR and Mass spectrometry. We also propose that this is the first report for isolation of laccaic acid-A using preparative HPLC with a good yield and purity.