Phytochemical Analysis

The rise of herbal medicine around the world has made it even more important to accurately identify crude herbal remedies to make sure they are safe, effective, and of good quality. This study used a combination of macroscopic, microscopic, and DNA barcoding techniques to verify twelve commonly used crude herbal medication samples from the Ayurvedic and Unani systems. The first visual and anatomical confirmation came from macroscopic and microscopic studies, respectively. DNA barcoding with rbcL and matK primers gave exact species-level identification by aligning the sequences with NCBI-BLAST. Five of the studied samples were consistently confirmed by all methods, but Bacopa monnieri was still doubtful because its shape was unclear and it only partially amplified. Using Cohen's Kappa (κ = 0.812), a statistical test, we found that the three methods agreed strongly with each other. These results show that a multi-tiered authentication strategy is better than using only one method. This supports the idea of a standardised protocol for validating herbal drugs in research and industry contexts.

Conventional antibiotic treatment of bacterial infections is hampered by prevalent antimicrobial resistance. In this research, the synergistic antibacterial activity of different herbal extracts and cefixime against resistant clinical isolates is tested. The preliminary antibiotic susceptibility and antibacterial activity of the herbal extracts were evaluated using disc diffusion and microbroth dilution. Checkerboard experiments, time-kill kinetics, and protein content assays were used to establish synergy. RP-HPLC phytochemical profiling showed high levels of gallic acid (0.24-19.7 μg/mg), quercetin (1.57-18.44 μg/mg), and cinnamic acid (0.02-5.93 μg/mg) in the extracts. 13/16 Gram-negative and 4/6 Gram-positive clinical isolates were resistant to intermediate or total cefixime. Aqueous plant extracts were non-synergistic, whereas ethanolic and methanolic were synergistic. Time-kill kinetics demonstrated that the synergistic interaction reduced bacterial load by 2–8 and was time- and concentration-dependent. The fractional inhibitory concentration index (FICI) combination therapy inhibited growth and protein content (5–62%) in the bacterial isolates from the antibiotic or extract. The research indicates herbal extracts are potential adjuvants to standard antibiotics in resistant microorganisms.