Original Articles
Vignesh Subramanian, Ishita Ba
Abstract
The objective of this work is to screen phytochemical and functional groups for analysis of four medicinally important plants namely paddy’s lucerne, castor, datura and Indian beech. The stem powders of these four plants were extracted with acetone, chloroform and water and these extracts were then used for phytochemical analysis to find out the presence of various compounds like alkaloids, flavonoids, tannins etc. The stem powders were also put through FTIR to find out the different functional groups present in the plants in order to understand their medicinal properties and activities better. Phytochemical analysis was performed to confirm the presence of seven phytochemical groups which are Saponins, Terpenoids, Flavonoids, Phenols, Sterols, Tannins, and Phytosterols in the four mentioned plants. Paddy’s lucerne and castor showed the presence of all the phytochemicals whereas datura and Indian Beech showed the absence of Phenol and Saponins respectively but showed the presence of rest all other phytochemicals. FTIR results showed the presence of various functional groups like amine, alkane, alkene, alcohol etc which aids to each of their medicinal properties. It can be concluded that presence of various pharmacological compounds gives them various characteristics and the presence of various functional groups aids their medicinal properties.