In the present paper, for the first time, we are interested to separate and identify some bioactive fractions isolated from the roots of a Saharan plant Anabasis articulata, which is widely used in traditional medicine against cancer. The crude methanolic extract of the roots was fractionated on column chromatography, and eluted with dichloromethane/methanol each time with increasing polarity of methanol; 17 fractions were separated. One of these fractions named F12 showed more antioxidant activity to scavenge DPPH free radical with percentage inhibition of 95.29%. F12 was separated by thin-layer chromatography (TLC) to give 12 compounds. A second preparative TLC of compound 2, which has antioxidative activity of 74.92%, provided the three phenolic acids M1, M2 and M3, analysed by high-performance liquid chromatography and UV-visible spectrophotometry.
Keywords: Anabasis articulata; DPPH; HPLC; UV–visible spectrophotometry; antioxidant activity; phenolic compounds.