Pharmacological Identification of Selected Piper Species

Abstract

Pharmacognostic studies are crucial because they help us to understand the chemistry, pharmacology, and therapeutic potential of a plant or plant product, which leads to the development of new drugs and treatments. It is no wonder that plants have immense therapeutic competence credited to the plant itself through its various secondary metabolites produced as part of their defence mechanism. Plants are an integral part of our age-old medical systems. The studied pharmacognostic and phytochemical characters, which can be used in the proper identification of the plants in powder form and thus we can eliminate the adulterants. The three species selected for the present work viz., Piper betle, P. longum and P. nigrum play a significant role in Ayurvedic medicine. In all species, leaves have medicinal properties, and thus we focused our studies on leaves only. Even though there is little variation morphologically, the stomatal number, palisade ratio, stomata index, etc showed the uniqueness of the species. In this study, it was proved that P. betle has the highest palisade ratio (2.95) and the stomatal index (11.11), which gave lights on its higher productivity so as the stomatal indices, which was found to be greater in P. betle. Determination of ash value is useful in determining the purity and quality of herbal medicines, as well as in assessing the presence of contaminants or adulterants. The qualitative estimation of phyto-compounds itself functions as a tool to identify adulterants in its crude form.  Overall, we can say that the pharmacognostic constants and the numerical standards reported for the leaves could be useful for the compilation of a suitable monograph for its proper identification.