Acta Pharm. 67 (2017) 385-395
Short communication
Curcumin: Synthesis optimization and in silico
interaction with cyclin dependent kinase
MAHMOOD AHMED, MUHAMMAD ABDUL QADIR, MUHAMMAD
IMTIAZ SHAFIQ, MUHAMMAD MUDDASSAR, ABDUL HAMEED, MUHAMMAD NADEEM ARSHAD and
ABDULLAH M. ASIRI
1 Institute of Chemistry, University of the
Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan 54590
2 Institute of Biochemistry and Biotechnology, University
of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan 54590
3 Department of Biosciences, COMSATS Institute
of Information Technology, Islamabad- Pakistan
4 H.
E. J. Research Institute of Chemistry, International Center for Chemical and Biological
Sciences, University of Karachi, Karachi-75270, Pakistan
5 Chemistry
Department, Faculty of Science, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia
6 Center
of Excellence for Advanced Materials Research (CEAMR), Faculty of Science, King
Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia
Accepted April 4, 2017
Published online May 9,
2017
Curcumin is a
natural product with enormous biological potential. In this study, curcumin synthesis was revisited using different reaction
solvents, a catalyst (n-butylamine) and a water scavenger [(n-BuO)3B],
to develop the optimal procedure for its rapid acquisition. During synthesis,
solvent choice was found to be an important parameter for better curcumin yield and high purity. In a typical reaction,
acetyl acetone was treated with boron trioxide, followed by condensation with
vanillin in the presence of tri-n-butyl
borate as water scavenger and n-butylamine as catalyst at 80 °C in ethyl acetate to afford curcumin. Moreover, curcumin was
also extracted from turmeric powder and spectroscopic properties such as IR,
MS, 1H NMR and 13C NMR with synthetic curcumin
were established to identify any impurity. The purity of synthetic and
extracted curcumin was also checked by TLC and
HPLC-DAD. To computationally assess its therapeutic potential against cyclin dependent kinases (CDKs), curcumin was docked in different isoforms
of CDKs. It was observed that it did not dock at the active sites of CDK2 and
CDK6. However, it could enter into weak interactions with CDK4 protein.
Keywords: curcumin synthesis, CDKs,
molecular docking