In Vitro Anthelmintic Activity Evaluation of the Aerial Part of Ruellia tuberosa Linn. Against Eudrilus eugeniae

Abstract

The ever growing problems caused by perpetual helminth infections especially in third world countries has paved way for scientists to continually search for potential sources of alternatives. Ruellia tuberosa Linn., locally known as “cracker plant”, is a ubiquitous Philippine medicinal that is traditionally used as remedy for a variety of diseases. In the light of plant-based anthelmintic drug development, the present study was conducted to evaluate the anthelmintic activities of the decoction (RTD), crude ethanol (RTE), chloroform-soluble (RTC) and hexane-soluble (RTH) extracts and its fractions from the aerial part of R. tuberosa Linn. against Eudrilus eugeniae (African night crawler earthworms).Anthelmintic assay was employed at various concentrations in which the activity of the test samples was determined by correlation with time. Results showed that in vitro anthelmintic assay of crude ethanol extract relatively gave better results with respect to paralysis and death of earthworms compared to its decoction counterpart. Meanwhile, both organic soluble extracts exhibited notably better anthelmintic activities and were faster to bring about paralysis on the worms as compared to the aqueous and alcoholic extracts. Furthermore, all fractions of the nonpolar and mid-polar extracts showed significantly higher anthelmintic activities compared to its mother extracts (RTH and RTC). Additionally, among all organic fractions tested, RTC4 showed fairly high mortality rates incurred on the test organisms in which similar result was obtained in comparison for its two parent crude extracts RTC and RTE. A concentration-dependent toxicity relationship was also observed during the conduct of all bioassays. Subsequently, among all extracts and fractions tested, RTC4 gave fastest mean time in paralyzing and killing the earthworms (34.42±4.00min and 36.11±4.32min), thus, exhibited best anthelmintic activity that is remarkably comparable to the positive control, mebendazole (54.58±2.17min and 76.49±12.60min). Considering the results from the mid-polar extracts of the plant sample for the given assay, R. tuberosa Linn. showed great potential for plant-derived anthelmintics.