Isolation of mitraphylline from Uncaria tomentosa (Willd. ex Schult.) DC. barks and development of spectrophotometric method for total alkaloids determination in Cat's Claw samples.

Uncaria tomentosa is traditionally used against many illnesses. Herbal medicines obtained from this species are already approved to treat certain medical conditions. Their usual quality control requires highly specific and very expensive analytical standards for high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) methods, which considerably impact the cost of the final products. In this work, an efficient and low-cost method for mitraphylline isolation, and a simple and fast spectrophotometric method suitable for determination of total alkaloids in U. tomentosa samples are presented.