Abstract

Many medicinal herbs have beneficial health effects. These have been used as flavoring agents in food, to prevent food from deterioration and antimicrobials against pathogenic microorganisms. The present study investigated the antimicrobial activity of aqueous, ethanolic, n-hexane and sonicated n-hexane extracts of fresh and spoiled spinach,Spinacia oleracea against mammalian pathogens through agar disc diffusion method. The common mammalian bacterial strains assayed for antimicrobial were Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella typhimurium, Escherichia coli, Pasteurella multocida, Lactobacillus bulgaricus, Micrococcus luteus, Klebsiella pneumonia, Proteous vulgaris, andStaphylococcus epidermidis. The aqueous extracts of both fresh and spoiled spinach inhibited the growth of all tested pathogens except for S. typhimurium. Similarly, the aqueous extract of fresh sample also had no effect on the growth of M. luteus. The ethanolic extracts significantly inhibited all the bacterial strains tested. It was also observed that the n-hexane extracts of fresh and spoiled vegetable were most effective against S. typhimurium and S. aureus, whereas the extracts of fresh and spoiled sonicated n-hexane only inhibited the growth of S. typhimurium as compared to other pathogens. This study show that spinach could be a potential source of new antimicrobial agents.

Key words: Antibacterial activity, agar disc diffusion method, bacterial pathogens,Spinacia oleracea.