Bioassay Guided Fractionation, Phytochemicals and Toxicity Evaluation of Eucalyptus camaldulensis Leave Extracts

Background: Medicinal plants have found a wide range of application in pharmacy, medicine, and toxicology, and are very valuable tool for their bioassay guided fractionation. About 70% of huge development efforts from medicinal plant centers are on the safety of such plants in laboratory or experimental animal as well human Leaves of E. camaldulensis are known to possess many biological and pharmacological effect for treatment of many diseases. and it has been reported to have antioxidants, cytotoxic effects, antimicrobial and anti-dermatophytes properties. This study is aimed to determine the phytochemical content and acute toxicity study of Eucalyptus camaldulensis leave extract using different solvent of varying polarity.

Methods: Bioassay Guided Fractionation of Aqueous Leave Extract of Eucalyptus camaldulensis were carried out and Sequentially fractionated using hexane, ethyl acetate and chloroform. The acute toxicity study LD50 (oral rats) was evaluated according to Muhammad [1] while the phytochemicals screening was conducted using the methods described by Brain and tuner [2].

Results. The percentage yield of the four solvent extract of Eucalyptus camaldulensis leaves extract showed that ethyl acetate extract has the highest yield followed by aqueous extract. While hexane and chloroform extract showed low yield when compared with the ethyl acetate and aqueous extract. The phytochemical screening of Eucalyptus camaldulensis aqueous, hexane, ethyl acetate and chloroform leave extracts shows the presence of tannins, saponins, Flavonoids, Cardiac Glycosides, Steroids, Terpenoids and Anthraquinones. However, saponins, flavonoids steroids and Terpenoids were absent in chloroform, hexane and ethyl acetate, hexane and aqueous extract respectively, while alkaloids were found to be absent in all the four solvent extracts. The acute lethal study of aqueous, hexane, ethyl acetate and chloroform extract of Eucalyptus camaldulensis Leaves were found to be greater than 5000 mg/kg body weight.

Conclusion and Recommendation: The finding showed that Eucalyptus camaldulensis leave extract possess some bioactive constituents of pharmacological important and all the extracts such as aqueous, hexane, chloroform and ethyl acetate were found to be practically non-toxic to the experimental animals It is recommended that further studies should be explored for isolation of the active ingredient for drugs discovery.