A Study of Antioxidant and Anti-bacterial activities of Borassus flabellifer

Abstract

The present study was designed to estimate the antimicrobial and antioxidant activities of ethanolic and aqueous extract of Borassus flabellifer fruit, juice, leaves and sap. The antioxidant evaluation was carried out by various radical scavenging assays and antimicrobial activity by the disk diffusion method. For antibacterial activity, bacterial species such as Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus were tested for all extracts. The extract showed moderate antioxidant activity when compared to the standard vitamin C. In both DPPH and nitric oxide oxide assay when related IC 50 value, ethanolic fruit extract showed promising results of 132 and 119  µg/mL respectively with ascorbic acid as standard which showed 25 and 35 µg/mL respectively. In Ferric Thiocyanate (FTC) Method and Thiobarbituric Acid (TBA) Method the radical scavenging activity of ethanolic fruit extract showed satisfactory results of 160 and 148 µg/mL ascorbic acid being the standard which showed 94 and 97 µg/mL respectively. The total flavonoid contents were 32.7 /100g for ethanolic sap extracts and 53.9/100g in aqueous extract of sap. The fruit juice extract showed maximum inhibition zone with 31.4 and 32.1 mm against E. coli and S.aureus correlated other extracts .Ethanolic and aqueous sap extracts zone of inhibition was 25.2 and 26.8 against E. coli and zone of inhibition was 28.3 against S.aureus in both ethanolic and aqueous sap. Ethanolic and aqueous leaves extracts zone of inhibition was 28.5 and 24.1 against E. coli. Ethanolic and aqueous leaves extracts zone of inhibition was 30.4 and 25.8 against S.aureus. Herein, the results suggest that the Borassus flabellifer plant extracts have potential antioxidant and antimicrobial properties.