Isolation and characterization of curcumin from powdered rhizomes of turmeric plant marketed in Maragheh city of Iran with soxhlet techni-que

Turmeric (Curcuma longa L.) is extensively used as a spice, food preservative and coloring ma-terial. It has been used in traditional medicine for various diseases. Curcumin, the main yellow bioactive component of turmeric has been shown to have a wide spectrum of biological actions. Heretofore, it has been reported that natural colored extracts were isolated from turmeric rhi-zomes with many methods such as maceration, digestion, microwave and infusion. In this paper, it was tried to isolate and characterize curcumin from the curcumin rhizomes marketed in Ma-ragheh city of Iran by soxhlet extraction technique in methanol solvent. The advantage of this technique is the isolation of large amounts of curcumin (208 mg from 25 g turmeric rhizomes powder) with smaller quantity of methanol.