Synthesis and characterisation of copper acetate mediated oxidative coupled product of naturally occurring hydroxy benzoquinone, embelin and its and cytotoxic studies in Dalton Lymphoma ascites tumour cells.

Embelin is an active phytoconstituent known to exhibit a variety of biological activities, especially active against various cancer and tumour cell lines. In the present work, embelin was extracted and isolated from and was structurally modified by incorporating different fluoro substituted aniline in the quinone motif with a view of enhancing the biological activity. The synthesis was carried out in presence of copper acetate catalyst in a protic solvent, glacial acetic acid to obtain EDFA, ETFA and EOCF and were characterised by various spectral techniques.