జర్నల్ ఆఫ్ ఎకోసిస్టమ్ & ఎకోగ్రఫీ

నైరూప్య

Leaves of Vallisneria Finds Source to Anti Dermatitis: Enriching Wetland Ecosystem

Nabanita Chakraborty, Basudev Mandal and Archan Kanti Das

The renaissances of phyto-medicines lead to a resolute search of potential medicinal plants worldwide. In this perspective, predominantly, terrestrial allelochemistry has been an imperative tool to evaluate the drug potentiality of a plant. However, in aquatic ecosphere, the pharmaceutical evaluation of the aquatic macrophytes is an emerging aspect. Our study seeks to explore the curative traits of the exotic macrophyte, Vallisneria spiralis L. (Hydrocharitaceae), a perennial stoloniferous species and a key ecological community in freshwater wetland ecosystem. It is commonly used as aquarium plant and inhabits both in lentic and lotic environment of tropical and sub-tropical regions worldwide. Being rapid colonizers of aquatic ecosystem, literature study states the leaves of the macrophyte can excrete special function groups that can absorb, filter and precipitate chemical compound of water and through the auxiliary function of the microorganism. Considering these significances, we have extracted the leaf leachates of Vallisneria in 80% ethanol which had been purified by solid-liquid extraction process and further crystallized and subjected to biochemical analysis viz; phenols, flavonoids and tannins followed by antioxidant scavenging and microbial screening. Further the isolated compound was subjected to Mass and Fourier Infra-red Spectrometry. Comprehensively, all the experimental assays infer that Vallisneria leaves contain bioactive compound with mol wt. m/z 359 structured with microbial growth inhibiting functional groups which were found fungicidal against Malassezia globosa - the dandruff causing dermatitis fungus.