ABSTRACT
Medicinal plants include a various types of plants used in herbalism and some of these plants have a medicinal activities. These medicinal plants consider as a rich resources of bioactive ingredients such as alkaloids, tannins, flavonoids, steroids, saponins, and phenols which can be used in drug development and synthesis. Picralima nitida is considered as one of the many examples of medicinal plants with great therapeutic potentials. Among the therapeutic properties reported from Picralima nitida include antimalarial, antiinflammatory, analgesic, larvicidal, anit-microbial, anti-ulcer, and antioxidants properties just to mention a few. The aim of the study was to determine the in vitro qualitative and quantitative phytochemical screening of Picralima nitida. The objectives were to screen qualitatively for (alkaloids, tannins, saponins, phenols, glycosides, terpenoids, flavonoids, steroids, phytosterols, anthocyanins, and proanthocyanidins), and quantitatively for (proanthocyanidins, total phenol content, total flavonoid, total tannin, and total saponin). Graphpad prism 8.0.1 was used to analyse all data using analyses of variance (ANOVA). The result obtained from the in vitro qualitative phytochemical screening shows that Picralima nitida was very high in (saponins, phenols, and alkaloids); moderate in (tannins, glycosides, and terpenoids); and low in (flavonoids, steroids, and phytosterols); anthocyanidin was observed to be absent. The result from the quantitative phytochemical screening revealed that total flavonoid (331.64 ± 1.39) was the most abundant phytochemical present in picralima nitida followed by total saponins (213.79 ± 2.50), proanthocyanidins (129.00 ± 2.17), total phenol (92.45 ± 0.84), and finally total tannins (64.89 ± 1.75). These findings justified the applications of picralima nitida in African folklore and also provide a platform for further investigations to completely explore the pharmacologic and therapeutic potentials of this plant.
