Abstract

EVALUATION OF ANTIMICROBIAL AND ANTIOXIDANT ACTIVITY OF UNRIPE AND HALF RIPE AEGLE MARMELOS CORR. FRUITS

Deepika Gupta*, PP John, Pankaj Kumar, Dr. Jainendra Jain, Rahul Kaushik, Prof. Manoj Kumar Gupta

ABSTRACT

This study was undertaken to examine the antioxidant and antimicrobial activity of methanolic extract of Aegle marmelos unripe or half ripe fruits. The antioxidant activity was done by using DPPH free radical scavenging assay. The IC50 (The concentration of sample required to scavenge 50% of DPPH free radical) was calculated by plotting graph between % inhibition vs concentration. The ascorbic acid was used as standard antioxidant in comparison to methanolic extract of Aegle marmelos. The IC50 value of extract and ascorbic acid was found to be 62.59 μg/ml and 2.80 μg/ml. The antimicrobial activity was performed using two strains of bacteria E. coli and S. aureus. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of the extract was taken out against two strains and was compared with the inhibition of standard drug tetracycline. From the results it may be concluded that the methanolic extract of Aegle marmelos has significant activity against E. coli and S. aureus, the average inhibition of the test drug against E. coli is 0.43 which is comparable with the inhibition of tetracycline, 0.954. Again the average inhibition of test drug was found to be 0.49 which was again comparable with the standard, which showed its median inhibition of 0.965 against S. aureus. The antioxidant and antimicrobial activities found in Aegle marmelos may be associated with their main phytochemical compounds like flavonoids, phenols and tannins. This gives the support that the fruit can be used as the medicinal plant to treat free radical damages in cells and could also be used as medicinal supplement which could we used with other drugs to give synergistic effect, as it showed sufficient antibacterial activity at high concentration as compared to standard drug tetracycline.

Keywords: flavonoids, phenols and tannins.