Bangladesh Journal of Pharmacology Volume: 15; Number 2; Year 2020 Cite this article as: Sundar RDV, Arunachalam S. Antibacterial activity of Dracaena colorama. Bangladesh J Pharmacol. 2020; 15: 71-73. Antibacterial activity of Dracaena colo- rama Sir, The antibacterial effect of Dracaena cinnabari (Altwair and Edrah, 2015), D. mahatma (Saranya et al., 2018), D. marginata (Shiny et al., 2012), D. spicata (Nazneen, 2013) and D. victoria (Sundar et al., 2019) have been described. The present study aimed to evaluate the antibacterial activity of D. colorama leaf extracts against microbial pathogens. Fresh and healthy leaves of D. Colorama were collected from VIT Greenhouse. Leaves were washed 2-3 times with double distilled water and shade dried for 2-3 weeks. With the help of mortar and pestle, leaves were grounded into a fine powder and stored in a fresh airtight container for further use. Solvents used for the preparation of extract were n-hexane, ethyl acetate and acetone. About 10 g of the powdered leaf was added to 100 mL of solvent respectively in the conical flask and kept in the shaker at 120 rpm for 2 days. The content was filtered using Whatman filter paper No. 1. On allowing the filtrate to air dry, 2-3 g of crude extract was obtained. The crude extract was analyzed for antibacterial activity using agar well diffusion assay. Muller Hinton agar medium was prepared and poured into the Petri plates after sterilization. Bacterial lawn cultures were made using four different test strains (Escherichia coli, Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella typhi, Pseudomo- nas aeruginosa). The wells were made using cork borer and 100 µL of different concentrations of extracts were added and plates were incubated at 37°C for 24 hours. After incubation, the plates were checked for the zone of inhibition. Streptomycin was used as a positive control. The crude extracts of the sample were subjected to GC- MS analysis to determine the bioactive compounds present. The instrumentation used for this purpose was a Perkin Elmer Clarus 680, furnished with Mass spectrometer Clarus 600 (EI) with a mounted Elite-5MS capillary column (30, 0.5 mm ID, 250-micrometer df). The preliminary oven temperature was maintained at 55°C for 3 min and then raised to 300°C in 10 min and held for 6 min. The carrier gas used for analysis was helium, at a constant flow rate. The source temperature and mass transfer line was set at 240°C. The software employed for the analysis was Turbo version 5.4.2. The structure of the compound could be identified by comparing the mass spectral pattern obtained with Literature archives and standard compounds present in the National Institute of Standards and Technology Library (NIST-LIB 0.5) which is inbuilt into the GCMS software system (Papitha et al., 2017). All three extracts showed significant activity against the tested bacterial strains. On comparing to hexane and acetone, ethyl acetate extract was active against all the strains at their 50, 75, 100 µg/mL concentrations. The compounds identified by GC-MS analysis were represented as compounds and retention time within brackets. The GC-MS analysis of acetone extract reveal- ed the presence of 2,4,4-trimethyl-3-hydroxymethyl-5a- (3-methyl-but-2- (28.7), the hexane extract has 3,5- octanedione,6,6,7,7,8,8,8-heptafluoro-2,2-dimeth (28.5) and (E,E,E)-3,7,11,15-tetramethylhexadeca-1,3,6,10,14- pen (29.0) compound was present in ethyl acetate extract. The present study concluded that all three (n-hexane, acetone and ethyl acetate) extracts have significant antibacterial activity against the tested bacterial strains A Journal of the Bangladesh Pharmacological Society (BDPS) Bangladesh J Pharmacol 2020; 15: 71-73 Journal homepage: www.banglajol.info Abstracted/indexed in Academic Search Complete, Agroforestry Abstracts, Asia Journals Online, Bangladesh Journals Online, Biological Abstracts, BIOSIS Previews, CAB Abstracts, Current Abstracts, Directory of Open Access Journals, EMBASE/Excerpta Medica, Global Health, Google Scholar, HINARI (WHO), International Pharmaceutical Abstracts, Open J-gate, Science Citation Index Expanded, SCOPUS and Social Sciences Citation Index ISSN: 1991-0088; DOI: 10.3329/bjp.v15i2.45800 Letter to the Editor This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to copy, distribute and perform the work. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor Figure 1: Antibacterial activity of the ethyl acetate extract on L. monocytogenes (A), E. coli (B), S. typhi (C) and P. aeruginosa (D) under in vitro condition. Ethyl acetate extract was active against all the four bacterial strains (L. monocytogenes, E. coli, S. typhi, P. aeruginosa) and showed highest zone of inhibition against P. aeruginosa of about 16 mm at 100 µg/mL concentration whereas n-hexane crude extract did not show any activity against S. typhi. This is the first report on the antibacterial activity of D. colorama leaf extracts. They used E. coli, P. aeruginosa and S. typhi strains similar to that of this study. It is reported that Draceana species (D. cinnabari, D. spicata and D. mahatma) were active against E. coli whereas D. spicata active against S. typhi (Nazneen, 2013) and D. cinnabari was active against P. aeruginosa (Altwair and Edrah, 2015). Shiny et al., 2012 reported antibacterial activity of D. marginata against human pathogens. Apart from that, we have used L. monocytogenes strain in this study. The authors thank Vellore Institute of Technology for providing lab facility to carry out this study. Ranjitha Dhevi V. Sundar and Sathiavelu Arunachalam School of Biosciences and Technology, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore 14, India. Corresponding author: email: asathiavelu@vit.ac.in 72 Bangladesh J Pharmacol 2020; 15: 71-73 Table I In vitro antibacterial activity of the leaf extract Extract (µg/mL) Zone of inhibition (mm) L. monocytogenes S. typhi P. aeruginosa E. coli Hexane (50) 11 - 14 12 Hexane (75) 12 - 15 14 Hexane (100) 14 - 10 14 Ethyl acetate (50) 13 14 14 13 Ethyl acetate (75) 14 11 15 13 Ethyl acetate (100) 15 14 9 16 Acetone (50) 12 7 12 14 Acetone (75) 12 7 - 15 Acetone (100) 13 8 - 15 Streptomycin (10) 24 2 23 15 Figure 2: Chromatogram of n-hexane extract References Altwair K, Edrah S. 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