Antimicrobial Potential of Dacryodes edulis against Selected Clinical Bacterial Isolates

Abstract

The antimicrobial potential of Dacryodes edulis was investigated to determine the antimicrobial properties of the collected raw D. edulis pulp and seed extracts on some medically important human pathogens. The research was investigated against the selected human pathogens using standard microbiological and biochemical procedures. The D. edulis samples were harvested aseptically between the periods of April to June 2016 from its tree located at IBB way, Calabar Municipality, Nigeria. The aqueous and ethanolic extracts of the seed and pulp at varying concentrations of 1 g/10 ml, 2 g/10 ml, 4 g/10 ml, 5 g/10 ml  was tested against some selected human pathogens such as Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumonia, Enterococcus faecalis, Escherichia coli,  Pseudomonas aeruginosa and  Proteus vulgaris. The antimicrobial susceptibility results of the ethanol extracts of D. edulis seed showed marginally higher zones of inhibition to the clinical bacterial isolates tested than the ethanol extract of the pulp tested against the same clinical isolates. The organisms were resistant to the aqueous extracts of both the pulp and seed. The seed ethanol extracts showed a higher zone of inhibition of 21 mm against K. pneumoniae and 18 mm against P. vulgarisas compared to 18 mm as against K. pneumoniae and 17 mm against P. vulgaris showed by Gentamycin used as standard antibiotic control. The result of these has shown that D. edulis could be of immense importance in our nation’s young pharmaceutical industry for the development of new chemotherapeutic agent to address unmet therapeutic needs.