Phytochemical constituents and quantitative profile of twenty plant species from Nigeria Police Academy, Wudil.

Abstract

Phytochemicals are plant-derived bioactive compounds known to exert beneficial effects on human health. The failure of the synthesized drugs available now to effectively cure ailments provides a reason to explore other plants’ properties. As such this research was conducted with the aim of identifying some phytochemicals and the quantity of such bioactive compounds from 20 selected plants found in the Nigeria Police Academy, Wudil. Extracts from different plants species were screened and analyzed for their phytochemical contents. The analyses were performed using standard procedures. The qualitative analysis identified the presence or absence of major bioactive compounds, namely phenols, tannins, alkaloids, terpenoids, steroids, flavonoids, saponins and glycosides in both methanol and aqueous extract of the plant samples. The results further revealed that alkaloids and flavonoids appeared in all the selected plants while, only Ziziphus maurituana and Cynanchum Acacia sieberiana vincetoxicum were detected in all the screened phytochemicals. In the quantitative analysis, Azadirachta indica exhibited the highest levels of total phenols and total flavonoid with values of 67.09 mgGAE/g and 106.19QE/g respectively while the highest concentration of total alkaloid was detected in (22.34mg/g). Steroids were observed in only 5 out of the 20 plants that were screened. Based on the results obtained in this study, it can be concluded that, Azadirachta indica had the highest quantity of phenols and alkaloids. Again, Ziziphus maurituana and Cynanchum vincetoxicum were detected in all the screened phytochemicals while only five plants contained steroids.