Phytochemical Screening, in Vitro Antimycotic and Antioxidant Activities of Crude Extracts of Six Rwandan Medicinal Plants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Phytochemicals constitute reliable sources of antifungal and antioxidant compounds with low toxicity to mammals and safe to the environment which may serve as substitutes for synthetically produced chemicals. The present work aims at screening, and investigating the antimycotic and antioxidant activities of six medicinal plants, namely Croton macrostachyus (Euphorbiaceae), Clerodendrum (Rotheca) myricoides (Lamiaceae), Erucastrum arabicum (Brassicaceae), Melanthera scandens (Asteraceae), Senecio mannii (Asteraceae), and Senna didymobotrya (Fabaceae). A qualitative phytochemical screening was conducted by appropriate chemical methods. Antioxidant activity of 18 aqueous extracts has been tested by bleaching the solution of 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radical. Antimycotic activity of all extracts was measured by the disc diffusion method on a potato dextrose agar plate against five fungal strains viz. Rhizopus stolonifer, Aspergillus niger, Aspergillus flavus, Aspergillus parasiticus and Fusarium oxysporum. The study revealed that the main phytochemical constituents of leaf, stem and root bark extracts were terpenoids, tannins, saponins, alkaloids. Furthermore, the results showed that leaf extracts were richer in antioxidant potentials than the rest of the plant parts tested. However, scavenging capacity of leaf extract was lower than that of the ascorbic acid for all extracts except C. macrostachyus and M. scandens which exhibited approximately the same values as ascorbic acid. The leaf extracts displayed the highest inhibition zone average for most of the fungi. The strong antimycotic activity ranged from 14 to 27 mm and was observed mainly in leaf extracts. The leaf extract of M. scandens was the strongest against F. oxysporum with 27.0 mm inhibition zone diameter. The root extract displayed the lowest average zones of inhibition such as 2.0 mm for E. arabicum extract against R. stolonifer and 3.0 mm for S. didymobotrya extract against A. niger. Antioxidant and antimycotic activities were probably attributed to the presence of different groups of phytochemicals as such as terpenoids, flavonoids, and tannins. From the results of this study, plant extracts with higher antioxidant and antimycotic activity could be further studied and eventually be used in the development of natural antioxidants and food preservatives that could replace the synthetic compounds.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".