Preliminary Phytochemical and Comparative Growth Inhibitory Assay of the Aqueous and Chloroform Fractions of The Methanol Extract of The Leaves of Persea Americana Mill Lauraceae

Persea americana is a medicinal plant known to have numerous medicinal values. In ethnomedicine, the leaves are used in treating tumor related ailments. The growth inhibitory effects of the chloroform, aqueous fraction and its chromatographic sub-fractions were examined using the radicle length of guinea corn Sorghum bicolor seeds. In the growth inhibitory tests, the control seeds had an average length of 47.00  6.05 and 54.97  5.07 mm for the aqueous and chloroform fractions. While there was complete inhibition (100%) of seeds pre-treated with 20 and 30mg/ml of the aqueous fraction after an incubation period of 96 hours, 99.45 and 99.73% growth inhibition was recorded for the chloroform fraction at the same concentration and time. The aqueous fraction was subjected to vacuum liquid chromatography(VLC) due to its higher activity over the chloroform fraction and seven (7) sub-fractions were obtained in which sub-fractions 1-4 were not used for the bioassay because their quantity were negligible. At 10 mg/ml the VLC sub-fraction AQ-5 obtained from the VLC analyses of the aqueous fraction was observed to produce 98.84 % radicle growth inhibition while AQ-6 and AQ-7 produces 97.99 and 94.02% respectively. Based on similar TLC profile (Rf 0.91, 0.94 and 0.93) and biological activity, VLC sub-fractions 5, 6 and 7 were bulked for further research work. These results confirm the rationale behind the use of this plant in traditional medicine in treating tumor related ailments. However, further purification of the bulked VLC sub-fractions (AQ 5, 6 and 7) using bioassay guided fractionation may be necessary to isolate and characterize the active constituents responsible for this activity.

Author(s): Ikpefan Emmanuel Oise and Ayinde Buniyamin Adesina

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