Antibacterial efficacy of some Indian medicinal plants against human commensal pathogens

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Year 2017 Vol 6 Issue 3
Document Type : ORIGINAL ARTICLE
¹Boovaragamurthy Ahilan ²Pachaiyappan Saravana Kumar ³Veeramuthu Duraipandiyan ⁴Melvin A Daniel ⁵Savarimuthu Ignacimuthu
¹Division of Microbiology, Entomology Research Institute, Loyola College, Chennai, India-600 034.
²Division of Microbiology, Entomology Research Institute, Loyola College, Chennai, India-600 034.
³Division of Microbiology, Entomology Research Institute, Loyola College, Chennai, India-600 034.
⁴Division of Plant Biotechnology, Entomology Research Institute, Loyola College, Chennai, 600034, India
⁵Division of Microbiology, Entomology Research Institute, Loyola College, Chennai, India-600 034.
Abstract
The present study aimed to evaluate the antibacterial efficacy of the total flower extracts of five medicinal plants widely used in folk medicine in India, against some Gram positive and Gram negative bacteria.

The present work designed to assess the in vitro antibacterial activities of five medicinal plants (flowers of Bauhinia purpurea, Clitoria ternatea, Millingtonia hortensis, Nyctanthes arbortristis and Combretum indicum) against panel of Gram positive bacteria and Gram negative bacteria using disk diffusion assays.
Among the plants screened, Combretum indicum showed effective and broad spectrum antibacterial activity with zones of inhibition ranging from 10.33±0.57 to 23.33±1.52mm. Among the other four plants, only Clitoria ternatea showed moderate antibacterial activity at high concentration. The other three did not show any antibacterial activity. The phytochemical analysis of the active crude extract from C. indicum revealed the presence of steroids, terpenoids, phenols, flavonoids, quinonoids, alkaloids, glycosides and saponins. Moreover, C. indicum showed the highest activity against the tested pathogens with minimum inhibitory concentration (MICs) values ranging from 125-1000µg/mL. The qualitative chemical characterization by using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) revealed the presence of compounds such as beta-sitosterol, gallic acid, lupeol, rutin and quercetin which could be responsible for its significant broad spectrum activity. Conclusion: The results of this study suggest that the C. indicum flower extract could be probed further for possible use to control bacterial infections.
Keywords
Antibacterial Combretum indicum Bioactive Phytochemicals
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