Biol. Pharm. Bull. 29(5) 1053—1055 (2006)

used for diuretics and tonics. It is also known as a remedy for blood stasis such as arthralgia. Achyranthes genus plants generally contain phytoecdysons, oleanolic acid glycosides, and cytotoxic saponins. In our screening works for novel plant-derived anticancer agents, the methanolic extract of achyranthes roots actually exhibited moderate cytotoxic activity against human hepatoma cells. Most of cytotoxic ingredients in achyranthes roots are saponins. So we expected that heat-processed achyranthes roots would exhibit more potent cytotoxic activity than crude achyranthes in the same way just like ginseng. In case of ginseng, steaming the ginseng at high temperature greatly enhances its biological activity by causing hydrolysis of glycosidic bond in ginseng saponins. As expected, cytotoxic activity of heat-processed achyranthes roots was increased and we isolated the component that made the main contribution to enhanced cytotoxicity of heat-processed achyranthes against SK-Hep-1 cells with bioassay-linked HPLC-ELSD (high performance liquid chromatographyevaporative light scattering detector)-96 well system. In this study, we report the isolation and identification of the representative cytotoxic component from heat-processed achyranthes extract using bioassay-linked HPLC-ELSD96well system and the relationship between the amount of the active component and the steaming temperature in the processing.