Phytochemical Screening and Antioxidant Activity of Different Parts from Five Malaysian Herbs

Natural drugs play important and vital role in the modern medicine. It is usually used to cure some ailments which may not be treated by conventional medicine. Natural drugs may exhibit many biological activities, such as antimicrobial, anticancer, anti-diabetic and antioxidant. As the prevalence of the diseases due to free radicals increases over the years, the study of antioxidants, which is substances used to fight against the free radicals has stimulates the concerns of the public and researchers. Thus, the objective of the study is to extract and analyse different parts of 5 chosen Malaysian herbs. The ethanolic extracts of seeds of Carica Papaya, leaves of C. nutans, and S. crispa, fruit of M. charantia, and roots of T. cordifolia were used in the study to identify and compare their potential antioxidants properties by studying their effect on the standard free radical, 2,2-Diphenyl-1-picyrl-hydrazyl(DPPH). Vitamin E was used as the positive control of the study. Based on the results obtained, it was showed that the percentage of radical scavenging activity increases  when the concentration of plant extracts changes from 0.01mg/mL to 0.1mg/mL and to 1mg/mL. Besides that, among the five plants, the radical scavenging activity of S. crispa (93.75%±1.10) were highest and the seeds of C. papaya was the lowest (67.45%±9.04) compared to the other four plants when concentration of to 1 mg/mL. At concentration of 2.69 mg/mL, vitamin had 29.67%±4.59 of radical scavenging activity. The concentrations of plants extracted required to cause 50% loss of DPPH activity were also recorded and it showed that the plant with lowest IC50 was S.crispa (30.84μg/mL±1.07) and the highest was C.papaya(521.3μg/mL±1.10). The results show that S.crispa was the most potent antioxidants among the fivesamples and C.papaya was the least potents. Preliminary phytochemicals screening were also conducted to identify the presence of various phytochemicals, such as carbohydrate, protein, fats and oils, alkaloids, tannins, saponins, steroids, glycosides and flavonoids. This study is useful to aid in the development of drugs to treat various diseases, especially those due to free radicals.