In-vitro anti-mutagenic activity of Asparagus racemosus: An ayurvedic medicinal plant

Abstract

Asparagus racemosus is a plant traditionaly used in epilepsy, as a brain tonic, cardiac disorders, hypertension, habitual abortions, weakness of the uterus, excessive bleeding during menstruation. The current study evaluated the antimutagenic pottential of methanolic (RME) and aqueous methanolic extract (RAE) extracted from A. racemosus. Ames assay was used to acess the antimutagenic potential of RME and RAE (2.5x103, 1.0x103, 0.5x103, 0.25x103, 0.10x103 and 0.01x103 ?g 0.1 mL plate-1) that was added with mutagenic activation of TA98 and TA100 strain of Salmonella typhimurium. A. racemosus extract RME and RAE have been found to have effective in the inhibition of mutation induced by NPD and sodium azide. Among the two extracts, RAE showed maximum inhibition of 49.2% followed by RME having inhibition of 40.63% in Co-incubation mode. Current study indicated that A. racemosus can be used as a new source of anti-mutagenic. ? 2013 Academic Journals Inc.