Thesis (M.Sc.)--Chulalongkorn University, 2008

The hot water-soluble crude polysaccharide was extracted from Curcuma aromatica via boiling extraction and precipitated with ethanol. Then, the crude polysaccharide extract was fractionated by ion exchange chromatography on DEAE-cellulose column, and subsequently purified by gel filtration chromatography on Superdex G-200 column chromatography, giving three polysaccharide fractions called P11, P21 and P22. The major polysaccharide fraction P11 and P21 which both were characterized and measured cell proliferation. For P22 was only enough to study its cell proliferation because of its limited amount. Then they were studied for monosaccharide composition via acid hydrolysis method and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The molecular weight and functional group were determined by gel permeable chromatography (GPC) and fourier transformation infrared (FT-IR), respectively. P11 and P21 are only composed of the xylose. Their molecular weight average of P11 and P21 were 469,171 and 157,665 Da, respectively. Cell proliferation assay were performed using MTT technique and statistic analysis was performed by one-way ANOVA. Crude polysaccharide, P11 and P22 at the concentration 100 μg/ml showed ability of cell proliferation. The results were shown as percentage of increasing compared to control which are 43.93 17.18, 30.09 13.66 and 40.98 10.92% for crude polysaccharide, P11 and P22 respectively. While P21 at the same concentration showed its ability to inhibit the cell growth. The result indicated that it can inhibit the cell up to 92.16 3.49%. The one-way ANOVA indicated that all experimental results were significant (p<0.05).