Prosopis cineraria (L.) Druce, a leguminous desert tree of the family Fabaceae widely known as khejri, jand, or sangri, is used across the arid tracts of north-western India in traditional medicine. This study qualitatively screened the phytochemical constituents of bark and pod extracts of P. cineraria in petroleum ether, ethyl acetate, and methanol, and evaluated the in vitro antibacterial activity of the same bark and pod extracts against Escherichia coli. Plant material was collected from the campus of Maharshi Dayanand Saraswati University, Ajmer, in March-April, shade-dried, powdered, and extracted by Soxhlet apparatus, with dry-weight extractive yield calculated for each solvent-part combination. Extracts were screened for alkaloids, carbohydrates, proteins, saponins, tannins, flavonoids, and starch using standard colour and precipitation reactions. The antibacterial activity was assessed by the agar well diffusion method across a concentration gradient (0.05-2 mg/mL), with ampicillin and DMSO as positive and negative controls. Petroleum ether extracts of bark and pods showed comparatively few positive phytochemical reactions, whereas ethyl acetate and methanolic extracts of bark and pods showed a broader positive profile, including alkaloids, carbohydrates, tannins, and flavonoids, consistent with methanol and ethyl acetate's greater capacity to solubilize both polar and non-polar metabolites than non-polar petroleum ether. Methanol also gave the highest dry-weight extractive yield in both tissues (7.5% for bark, 3.2% for pods), with bark yielding more extract by mass than pods in all three solvents. Bark extracts inhibited E. coli at markedly lower concentrations than pod extracts in both petroleum ether and ethyl acetate; the ethyl acetate bark extract was the most active preparation, producing a zone of inhibition of 32 mm at 1 mg/mL, approaching the ampicillin positive control (approximately 36 mm), while pod extracts in all three solvents required concentrations above 1.2-1.6 mg/mL before comparable inhibition was observed. These findings support the traditional use of P. cineraria bark in infection-related remedies and identify bark ethyl acetate extract as the most promising material for further bioassay-guided fractionation.
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Year
2026
Volume
Vol 1
Serial
6
