A new NMR approach for structure determination of thermally unstable biflavanones and application to phytochemicals from Garcinia buchananii.

Previous activity-guided phytochemical studies on Garcinia buchananii stem bark, which is traditionally used in Africa to treat various gastrointestinal and metabolic illnesses, revealed xanthones, polyisoprenylated benzophenones, flavanone-C-glycosides, biflavonoids, and/or biflavanones as bioactive key molecules. Unequivocal structure elucidation of biflavonoids and biflavanones by means of NMR spectroscopy is often complicated by the hindered rotation of the monomers around the C-C axis (atropisomerism), resulting in a high spectral complexity. In order to facilitate an unrestricted rotation, NMR spectra are usually recorded at elevated temperatures, commonly over 80 °C, which effects in a single set of resonance signals. However, under these conditions, one of the target compounds of this investigation, (2R,3S,2″R,3″R)-manniflavanone (1), undergoes degradation. Therefore, we demonstrated in the present study that the 1,1-ADEQUATE could be successfully used as a powerful alternative approach to confirm the C-C connectivities in 1, avoiding detrimental conditions. However, a moderate increase in temperature up to 50 °C was sufficient to deliver sharp signals in the proton NMR experiment of (2R,3S,2″R,3″R)-isomanniflavanone (2) and (2″R,3″R)-preussianone (3). In addition, two new compounds could be isolated, namely (2R,3S,2″R,3″R)-GB-2 7″-O-β-D-glucopyranoside (4) and (2R,3S,2″R,3″R)-manniflavanone-7″-O-β-D-glucopyranoside (5), and whose structures were elucidated by spectroscopic analysis including 1D and 2D NMR and mass spectrometry methods. The absolute configurations were determined by a combination of NMR and electronic circular dichroism (ECD) spectroscopy. The aforementioned compounds exhibited high anti-oxidative capacity in the H2O2 scavenging, hydrophilic Trolox equivalent antioxidant capacity (H-TEAC) and hydrophilic oxygen radical absorbance capacity (H-ORAC) assays.