Antioxidant properties of wild Solanum nigrum ripe fruit

This work was to examine hepatoprotective activities of Solanum nigrum, commonly known as Black Nightshade, a medicinal herb grown in Egypt used traditionally in oriental medicines and believed to have various biological properties. A crude ripe fruit ethanol extract was made, lyophilized to give 2.86g/100g. Two sets of experiments were done, in vitro antioxidant experiments and in vivo biological assays. The results revealed that crude ethanol extracts of Black Nightshade ripe fruit had strong antioxidant activity, for example in a DPPH assay at 500 ppm of the extract, a 68% reduction of DPPH radicals was detected, with total antioxidant capacity at 8.45±0.031 as ascorbic acid equivalents. In vivo, the extract; 100, 200 or 300mg/Kg; showed valuable activity as a hepatoprotective agent on oral one dose CCl₄-treated experimental rats shown by an increase in total serum soluble protein, albumin, and a remarkable reduction in the serum activity of AST, ALT and ALP as well as bilirubin and uric acid. For example, the serum total albumin level was reduced from 6.29±0.12g/dl in the healthy normal control animals to 3.35±0.37g/dl (53% at normal control) for CCl₄ intoxicated control rats, but recovered to 5.62±0.39g/dl by 300mg extract per kg body weight for rats on daily oral post-treatment for 5 days. Collectively, Black Nightshade ripe fruit ethanol extracts were shown to be an effective hepatoprotective agent in vivo due to their high content of antioxidant and bioactive plant secondary metabolites.

Keywords: Solanum nigrum L., Black Nightshades, Hepato-protective, Antioxidant, CCl₄

Acknowledgement: The authors thanks Dr. Emam Abdel-Mobdee, Biochemistry department, Faculty of Agriculture, Cairo University for his great support. Thanks to Kamela Alegre, American PhD student at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, for Language revision.

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Loganayaki N, Siddhuraju P and Manian S (2010) Food Science and Biotechnology 19(1): 121–127