Abdulai Turay, Malik Dawood Kamara, Sitta Kamara, Senesie Kamara and Florence Gbabai

Background: Historically, flora has inspired many pharmaceuticals, and plant-based remedies continue to contribute to modern therapeutics (Shareef and Sohail Akhtar, 2018a) ^[18]. Although many tree-derived agents have been superseded by synthetics, arboreal sources still yield valuable pharmacodynamic constituents (Department of Microbiology, Government Medical College, Datia, India. et al., 2022) ^[5]. Azadirachta indica (Neem) is a versatile Meliaceae species producing numerous non‑wood products and widely used in traditional medicine (Islas et al., 2020; Herrera-Calderon et al., 2019) ^{[9, 7]}. Growing AMR underscores the need to evaluate neem’s bioactivities (Shuvo et al., 2024; Alzohairy, 2016) ^{[20, 3]}.

Aim: To determine the phytochemical constituents and evaluate in vitro antibacterial and antiplasmodial activities of A. indica leaf and bark extracts.

Methods: Shade‑dried leaves and bark were Soxhlet‑extracted with ethanol, ethyl acetate, or distilled water. Qualitative phytochemical screening followed standard tests (Sambo et al., 2015; Ekeleme et al., 2017) ^{[17, 6]}. Antibacterial activity against Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, and Klebsiella pneumoniae used agar well diffusion on Mueller-Hinton agar. Antiplasmodial activity against Plasmodium falciparum employed Giemsa‑stained smears and microscopy; Artemether-Lumefantrine was a positive control (Annan et al., 2012) ^[4].

Results: Bark yielded more powdered mass (341.12 g) than leaves (228.31 g). Ethanol and ethyl acetate extracts showed richer profiles of alkaloids, glycosides, saponins, terpenoids, and tannins than aqueous extracts; steroids were absent. Peak antibacterial activity occurred with bark extracts (up to 19 mm against S. aureus; ethyl acetate 18 mm). Ethanol bark reduced parasitemia from 3,600 to 160 p/μL (~95.6%); ethyl acetate bark reduced to 380 p/μL (~88.3%). Distilled‑water extracts were least active.

Conclusion: Solvent polarity and plant part strongly influenced extract composition and bioactivity. Ethanol and ethyl acetate bark extracts displayed the greatest antibacterial and antiplasmodial effects, supporting further quantitative assays and fractionation (Muthukrishnan et al., 2021; Salawu et al., 2023; Ogbonna et al., 2020) ^{[13, 16, 14]}.

Pages: 164-168  |  22 Views  9 Downloads