Original Articles
S. Nandha Kumar and Nivetha Th
Abstract
Plant kingdom is a treasure house of potential drugs and in the recent years there has been an increasing awareness about the importance of medicinal plants. Drugs from plant sources are easily available, less expensive, safe, and efficient and rarely have side effects. Preliminary screening of phytochemicals is a valuable step in the detection of bioactive principles present in medicinal plants and may lead to novel environmentally friendly bioherbicides and drug discovery. In the present study, principal phytoconstituents from five solvent extracts of Hyptis suaveolens and Spathodea campanulata leaves were screened by using standard methods and resulted in the detection of the presence of tannins, flavonoids, phenolics, terpenoids, steroids, alkaloids and simple sugars. These phytocompounds were found higher in methanolic, aqueous and acetone extracts of both plants and hence they were characterized using UV-VIS and FT-IR to produce the spectrum profile. The crude extracts were scanned in the wavelength ranging from 200-800 nm and the characteristic peaks were detected. FTIR method was performed in mid infrared region 4000-400 cm-1 which was used to detect the characteristic peak values and their functional groups. The maximum compounds were found in the methanolic extract of H. suaveolens and the aqueous extract of S.campanulata with the presence of primary amines, alkanes, carboxylic acid, aromatics, alcohols, ketones and phenols. Our findings supported the evidence that these tested plants contain medicinally important bioactive compounds and it justifies their use in the traditional medicines for the treatment of various diseases.