Comparative study of antioxidant, metal chelating and antiglycation activities of Momordica charantia flesh and pulp fractions.

Momordica charantia is commonly used as a vegetable and folk medicine in most parts of South Asia. This study aims to determine and compare the antioxidant, metal chelating and antiglycation activities of aqueous extracts of M. charantia fruit flesh (MCF) and fruit pulp (MCP) fractions. Our results show that MCP has pronounced DPPH and ABTS radical scavenging potential compared to MCF. In the antiglycation assay both fractions illustrated considerable inhibitory activities against the formation of AGEs induced by glucose with an efficacy of 75 and 67% with 150 µl of MCP and MCF extracts respectively, almost equal to 0.3mM amino guanidine. Results for metal catalysed protein fragmentation and autoxidative and glycoxidation assays demonstrate that MCF and MCP inhibited metal catalysed protein fragmentation. The percentage of relative standard deviation for three replicate measurements of 150 µl of MCF and MCP was < 3.0% for antiglycation. The antioxidant assays with regression values of MCP (0.981 and 0.991) and MCF (0.967 and 0.999) were also recorded. We conclude that both extracts possess high antioxidant and antiglycation activities and are equally good sources of antioxidant and antiglycating agents.