In vitro antimicrobial activity of leaf, stem fruit and root crude extracts of Momordica cymbalaria Fenzl: A medicinally important cucurbit

Abstract

Medicinal plants are the best source for the worldwide synthetic drug industries. The compounds extracted from the medicinal plants contain several antimicrobial properties. It is necessary to systematically test plants for the detection of antimicrobial compounds to work on microbial pathogens for new drug development. The plant Momordica cymbalaria Fenzl. is a medicinally important cucurbit, which contains secondary metabolites like phenols, steroids, flavonoids, alkaloids, tannins and glycosides. Extracts of Momordica cymbalaria leaf, stem, fruit and roots were screened for the antimicrobial activity by using agar disc diffusion method. Streptomycin is used as a standard antibiotic and different types of solvents such as methanol, ethanol, chloroform, hexane and water were used for the antimicrobial activity. Among all the solvents methanol showed high antimicrobial properties against Streptococcus pneumoniae, Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Escherichia coli bacteria.