Flavonoids Distributing Profiles of Jujube in New Mexico

Jujube (Ziziphus jujuba Mill.), which belongs to the Rhamnaceae family, is becoming increasingly popular especially in the semiarid southwestern United States and it is considered to be an ideal economic crop for arid and semiarid areas where common fruit trees do not grow well. Jujube fruit is a well-known nourishing food and traditional Chinese medicine and the leaves have been exploited as tea. Flavonoids, important naturally occurring compounds, have been shown to have a wide range of biological and pharmacological activities. In order to determine the distributing profiles of flavonoids contents of jujube in New Mexico, we studied the effects of development stage, organ, and cultivar on the flavonoids contents of nine selected jujube cultivars from the NMSU Sustainable Agriculture Sciences Center at Alcalde, NM with a spectrophotometric method. The flavonoids contents showed great variations ranging from 1.39% to 0.01% (dry weight) respectively, depending on the cultivar, fruit development stages and organs. During fruit development, the highest fruit flavonoids contents (average 0.74%) were at the very green fruit stage and decreased to the lowest at the mature stage (average 0.09%) among the nine cultivars tested. However, the highest flavonoids contents in leaves increased slowly and reached the highest at mature stage (average 0.51%). Of the nine jujube cultivars tested, ‘Li’ had the highest flavonoids content compared to other cultivars in all different fruit development stages and its contents may vary with cultural practices. These results indicate that ‘Li’ is a good germplasm for flavonoids research. With higher flavonoid content, green fruit or early mature stage fruit and mature leaves are suitable for flavonoid extraction or flavonoid component analysis.