Evaluation Of Antioxidant And Anti-Inflammatory Activities, Total Phenolic And Flavonoid Content In Selected Medicinal Plants, Non-Edible Medicinal Mushrooms And Seaweed

ABSTRACT

Medicinal plants play a major role for sources of lead compounds in drug discovery. Studies done have shown that plants, fungi such as mushrooms and seaweeds are a good source of bioactive compounds with anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anti-cancer and antimicrobial activities. Antioxidants play main role by hindering oxidation by protecting cells from damage by free radicals. This protects the body from cancer and other chronic ailments like heart diseases. Anti-inflammatory effect is also important as it diminishes swelling and pain due to inflammation. A lot of studies have been done on medicinal values of higher plants but less on marine sources and wild non-edible medicinal mushrooms. Phenolics and flavonoids have a wide range of biochemical activities including antioxidant as well as anticarcinogenic. In this study, the anti-inflammatory and antioxidant activities, phenolic content and total flavonoid was evaluated from wild non-edible medicinal mushrooms: Ganoderma applanatum, Ganoderma lucidum and Trametus elegan; medicinal plants; -Urtica dioica, Prunus africana, Bridelia micrantha and brown algae; Eucheuma denticulutum. The antioxidant activity was assessed using 2, 2-diphenylpicryl-1-hydrazyl (DPPH) free radical scavenging method with ascorbic acid as reference standard while anti-inflammatory activity was achieved in vivo using mice as test animals. The total phenolic analysis was done using Folin-Ciocalteu reagent and expressed as Gallic acid equivalent (GAE/g) while the total flavonoid content was determined by use of aluminium chloride colorimetric method and expressed as Quercetin equivalent (QE/g). Antioxidant activity of all extracts increased with concentration. Ganoderma applanatum showed the highest scavenging activity of (95.56%, IC50< 0.025) while Urtica dioica leaves had the lowest (11.99%, IC50> 0.03) activity at 0.3mg/ml of the extract. Ganoderma lucidum showed the highest total phenolic (156 ± 3.45 GAE/g) and flavonoid (31.16 ± 0.04 QE/g) content. Anti-inflammatory activity was done using formalin induced edema. The plant extracts showed a significant effect (p