A Study of Malaria Infection Suppression by Bioactive Compounds from Extracts of a Tropical Medicinal Plant

The properties exhibited by natural products from plants, including the medicinal activity, can be ascribed to the type and nature of the biologically active compounds they contain. The scientific study of these bioactive compounds is a very important step in the research to discover new molecules for potential drugs development from such natural products. This study was carried out with the aim of investigating the malaria infection suppression effect of bioactive compounds from Alstonia boonei, a plant that is used in the traditional treatment of malaria in many African countries. There is scarcity of studies that have evaluated bioactive from Alstonia boonai with most of them ending only on evaluating the extracts, thus the importance of this study. The bioactive compounds present in the ethanolic and aqueous leaf, stem bark and root extracts of Alstonia booei were determined and identified by Gas Chromatography and Mass Spectrometer methods using the Angilent 6890 series GC-MS equipment. Antimalarial tests were carried out on the bioactive compounds using white albino mice infected with Plasmodium berghei and microscopy method to investigate their malaria infection suppression activity. The antimalarial tests carried out on these bioactive compounds revealed that they possess significant suppressive activity (at p < 0.05) against malaria parasite infection in mice which was dose-dependent. From this result it was concluded that the plant is a potential source for new antimalarial molecules and should be further investigated for antimalarial drug development.