QUALITATIVE COMPOSITION AND ANTIMICROBIAL ACTIVITY OF BITTER KOLA

ABSTRACT Medicinal plants can be regarded as the richest bio resource of drug of modern medicine, folks medicine and chemical entities or templates for synthetic drugs. Garcinia kola which is also known as bitter kola is found mainly in tropical rain forest region of Central and Western Africa and highly used for its medicinal purposes because of its anti-viral, anti-inflammatory, anti-diabetic, bronchio-dilator and anti-hepotoxic attributes. This project was designed to evaluate the qualitative composition and antimicrobial activity of Garcinia kola. Fresh seeds Garcinia kolawas collected from Gadau market Bauchi State. The aqueous extracts of the test plants were used against selected test organisms, Streptococcus, Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella typhi, and Escherichia coli. Disc diffusion method was adopted to test for susceptibility of the selected test bacteria to the extracts. Minimum inhibition concentration (MIC) was determined. The result of the phytochemical screening confirmed the presence of flavonoid, tannins and steroids and absence of alkaloids, saponins. The results of the antimicrobial activity showed that the aqueous extract of bitter kola possesses antimicrobial activity against four clinical isolates, which are staphylococcus aureus, Streptococcus, Escherichia Coli and salmonella typhi and is more effective on staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus followed by Salmonella. Seeds of bitter kola possessed reasonable antibacterial activity but with varied zones of inhibition, with Staphylococcus aureus isolate having the highest inhibitory zone (20.00) mm while Streptococcusand Escherichiacoli had the least inhibitory zone (14.00) mm. It was concluded that Garcinia kola seeds extract was effective against all the tested bacterial isolates in the study and as such could be used as an antibiotic if properly explored.