Research On Main Active Components In Red Fermented Rice From Yunnan Province

Red Fermented Rice (RFR) has an application history of more than a thousand years. It has been widely used in food coloring, brewing, traditional Chinese medicine and so on. Of late years, national scholars make more indepth and extensive researchs on RFR, including its biological functions, medical value, and the mechanism and moleculars of the activity ingredients. They realized that RFR has many physiological activities of anti-bacterial, anti-tumor, regulating blood lipid, blood pressure, blood sugar and so on.We investigated the main physiological active components of RFR from Yunnan province, extract them with 95% ethanol, and separate them by silicagel column chromatography, neutral alumina column chromatography, and thin layer chromatography and so on. Three compounds were gained from RFR, and identified by ESI-MS, H-NMR,13C-NMR, IR and HPLC. The three compounds were determined as (1) ergosterol, (2) lovastatin, (3) stigmasterol. Abundant stigmasterol is found from RFR for the first time.We separated 5.2 g stigmasterol from RFR, and the content was 13mg/g. The stigmasterol content of stigmasterol was 433 times of the content of substrate.The production of stigmasterol in RFR were discussed in the paper.As same as lovastatin, stigmasterol also has the activitie of reducing blood-lipid levels.The content of stigmastrtol was above 2 times of the content of lovastatin in RFR. So, we could conclude that stigmasterol, not only lovastatin, was important active ingredient.The determination methods of ergosterol, lovastatin and stigmasterol in RFR with HPLC were studied, and investigated in linearity, precision, stability repetition and recovery.The contents of ergosterol and lovastatin were measured with the established methods,and the results were 1.049 mg/g and 7.2032 mg/g respectively。The detection of standarded stigmasterol could go along successfully, but the sample can not. The reason may be there are some substances in RFR which will disturb the detection of stigmasterol. The pretreatment method will be the key of determination.