Priliminary Phytochemical Screening and Antimicrobial Study of Dry and Fresh Aqueous, Ethanolic and Chloroform Extracts of Rosa Indica Petals

Plants are a valuable source of a multitude of secondary metabolites which have been used as medicine since times. Most unarguable merit of using plants as a source of medicine is that they are low priced and readily available with very minimal side effects. The present study deals with the comparative analysis of dry and fresh aqueous, ethanolic and chloroform extracts of Rosa indica petals for its phytochemical screening. The results confirmed the presence of almost all tested secondary metabolites in aqueous and ethanolic extracts, whereas chloroform extract showed only the presence of saponins. Further study was proceeded only with dry and fresh aqueous and ethanolic extracts of Rosa indica petals for its antimicrobial activity against Gram negative bacteria including Escherichia coli (ATCC NO: 25922), Pseudomonas aeruginosa (ATCC NO: 27853) and gram positive bacteria including Staphylococcus aureus (ATCC NO: 43300), Enterococcus faecalis (ATCC NO: 29212) and Candida albicans (ATCC NO: 24433) which is an opportunistic pathogenic yeast. Both dry and fresh ethanolic extracts showed a comparatively higher zone of inhibition for all the microbes. Aqueous dry and fresh extracts showed zone of inhibition for Staphylococcus aureus and Enterococcus faecalis, where as none of the extracts showed antimicrobial activity against Candida albicans. Results from the above study suggest that the ethanolic extract of Rosa indica petal are an encouraging alternative to some of the antibacterial drugs. This in turn would potentially be used as natural source to treat various multi drug resistant bacterial strains.