TITLE:
Exploration of Ethnopharmacological Potential of Antimicrobial, Antioxidant, Anthelmintic and Phytochemical Analysis of Medicinally Important Plant Centella asiatica (L.) Urban in Mart. and Eichl.
AUTHORS:
Arusa Aftab, Zaheerud Din Khan, Zubaida Yousaf, Zill-e-Huma Aftab, Sumera Javad, Bushra Shamsheer, Maria Zahoor, Nadia Riaz, Sadia Javed, Hamna Yasin, Habiba Ramzan
KEYWORDS:
Antimicrobial Activity, Antioxidant Activity, Phyochemical, Anthelmintic
JOURNAL NAME:
American Journal of Plant Sciences,
Vol.8 No.2,
January
22,
2017
ABSTRACT: As there is a huge pressure on the cultivated
medicinal plants and due to this pressure a large number of plants are being
eradicated yearly. So to reduce this pressure on the cultivated plants an
effort is being done to use the wild plants as a good medicinal agent and a
cheaper source as well. The present study was undertaken to find out the
Antimicrobial activity, Antioxidant activity and Pharmacological Analysis of Centella asiatica. It is a wild plant and
mostly found on the damp places of plains and foothills. It was collected,
dried and extracted by maceration method in different polar and non-polar
solvents i.e. petroleum ether,
chloroform, methanol and distilled water. These extracts were further used to
find out the antimicrobial, antioxidant and anthelmintic activities. Centella asiatica showed
remarkable values comparable with the standard antimicrobial and antioxidant
agents. Well defined zones of inhibition were recorded indicating that the
plants were potent against pathogenic microbes, such as i.e. Bcteria (Staphylococcus
aureus, Staphyllococcus saprophyticus, E. coli) and fungi (Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Aspergillus parasiticus and Rhizopus oryzae). The antioxidant activity of all the plant extracts was studied by DPPH
Assay, Total Antioxidant Assay and Total phenolic Assay and the remarkable
values comparable with the standard antioxidants were recorded. For pharmacological
analysis different secondary metabolites indicated positive results whereas
some others gave negative results.