Elucidating the Biological Activity of Salvadora Persica and Salvadora Oleoides by Exploiting In Silico and Wet Lab Approaches

Abstract

Natural products like plant extracts and compounds are source of lead molecules used as drugs. Medicinal plants have been used to cure various diseases. 25% of the modern medicines are derived from plants and about the same percentage is the synthetic analogue of phytochemicals. Low cost and less toxicity of plant derived compounds make them very important candidates to be used as potential drugs. In this study two plants Salvadora persica and Salvadora oleiodes of Pakistan origin have been evaluated for their biological activity by using in silico and wet lab approaches. Current study investigated the bactericidal effects of these plants and obtained results indicated potent efficacy against multi drug resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Salmonella typhi. Roots and leaves extracts of these plants shown good free radical scavenging capability in DPPH assay. In vitro cytotoxicity evaluation using MTT assay showed that these extracts are non-toxic even at high concentrations. Different compounds of these plants were able to interact and bind to various bacterial multi drug resistance causing proteins and HCV proteins in silico. Among these phytochemicals a compound, Salvadorin, shown most stable binding with target proteins. After analyzing data and results depicted in this study, it is recommended to purify and characterize these plant extracts by using comprehensive techniques and evaluate their activities specifically, which might help in discovering new drugs with broad therapeutic potentials.