A comparative study on antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, genotoxicity, anti-microbial activities and chemical composition of fruit and leaf essential oils of Litsea cubeba Pers from North-east India

Litsea cubeba Pers. is a medicinal as well as aromatic plant distributed widely in North-East India. This study was designed to evaluate and compare antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, genotoxicity, antimicrobial activities and chemical composition of Essential oil of Litsea cubeba (EOLC) fruit and leaf collected from CSIR-NEIST, Jorhat (Assam) experimental farm. EOLC fruit and leaf showed effective and strong concentration-dependent antioxidant activity which increases with increase in oil concentration. In the in-vitro anti-inflammatory study, using egg albumin denaturation assay, it was demonstrated that EOLC fruit and leaf has strong activity towards protein denaturation assay in an optimum concentration, where diclofenac sodium was used as standard reference drug. EOLC fruit showed stronger activity than the leaf in in-vitro antioxidant and anti-inflammatory tests. Genotoxic effects showed EOLC fruit and leaf has the negligible effect on root growth inhibition, mitotic index and chromosome aberration in comparison to the standard ethyl methanesulphonate. Antimicrobial activity towards eight microbes was evaluated using Disc diffusion assay (DDa) and Minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) test, where no considerable effect was observed. GC-MS analysis of the oil revealed methyl heptenone (30.9%) as the major component in fruit EO and sabinene (25.22%) in leaf EO. This paper gives an overview of the biology, chemistry and toxicity of EOLC fruit and leaf. Since very few evidence available on the biological activity of North-East India Litsea cubeba EO in public domain so the possibilities on the exploitation of potential are discussed and tried to explore here.