Salvia africana-lutea L.:: a review of ethnobotany, phytochemistry, pharmacology applications and future prospects

Plants are nature’s reserve for vitality and health-boosting agents. Despite ever-rising interest and research on plant medicinal chemistry, many stones are still being left unturned. Moreover, many traditional medicinal plants are yet to be discovered or functionally characterized. This study presented an up-to-date review of a poorly explored member of the Salvia genus indigenous to Africa—Salvia africana-lutea L. (synonymous with Salvia aurea L.) with details on its geographical distribution, ethnobotany, and pharmacological applications. We reviewed all literature published on Salvia africana-lutea up to January 2023, retrieved from PubMed, Scopus, and ScienceDirect as primary databases and google scholar as the secondary source. From our literature search, we found 38 documents published on S. africana-lutea, despite the popularity of the Salvia genus as a medicinal plant (having over 15,000 articles published to date). From the retrieved literature, only a few studies focused on exploiting the ethnobotanical features of the plants, such as the morphology, flowering and existence, and nature of its trichomes. Some studies have reported S. africana-lutea as an excellent source of essential oils trapped within their leaf trichomes with numerous phytochemicals and bioactivities. Other studies have reported some interesting pharmacological activities of plant extracts and isolated phytochemicals, such as their antimicrobial, anti-oxidative, analgesic, antipyretic, anticancer, cytotoxic, and other bioactivities. We identified some limitations of the few published studies, highlighting future research needs that should draw more scientific interest to foster more study on this under-explored and valuable plant species of Salvia, to harness its medicinal and industrial potential fully

Isotherm modelling and optimization of oil layer removal from surface water by organic acid activated plantain peels fiber

This research aimed to optimize and model the adsorption process of oil layer removal using activated plantain peels fiber (PPF), a biomass-based material. The adsorbent was activated by thermal and esterification methods using human and environmentally friendly organic acid. Effects of process parameters were examined by one factor at a time (OFAT) batch adsorption studies, revealing optimal conditions for oil removal. Also, RSM, ANN and ANFIS were used to adequately predict the oil removal with correlation coefficient > 0.98. RSM modelling revealed the best conditions as 90 °C, 0.2 mg/l, 1.5 g, 6 and 75 mins, for temperature, oil–water ratio, adsorbent dosage, pH and contact time respectively. Under these simulated conditions, the predicted oil removal was 96.88 %, which was experimentally validated as 97.44 %. Thermodynamic studies revealed the activation energy, change in enthalpy and change in entropy for irreversible pseudo-first order and pseudo-second order model as (15.82, 24.17, −0.614 KJ/mols) and (33.21,40.31, −0.106 KJ/mols) respectively, indicating non-spontaneous process; while modeling studies revealed that the adsorption process was highly matched to Langmuir’s isotherm, with maximum adsorption capacity of 50.34 mg/g. At the end of the overall statistical modelling, ANFIS performed marginally better than the ANN and RSM. It can be concluded from these results that our biomass-based material is an efficient, economically viable and sustainable adsorbent for oil removal, and has potentials for commercialization since the process of adsorption highly matched with standard models, and its capacity or percentage oil removal also compares favorably to that of commercially available adsorbents

Allistatin:A potent yet uncharacterized therapeutic nugget in Allium sativum

Major solutions to human health challenges are encrypted in nature's resources. Despite the focus of contemporary research on characterizing plant natural products and phytochemicals, a vast number of plants are yet to be discovered, or their products functionally characterized. Garlic is one of the most common traditional Chinese medicinal plants and a hub of over 200 diverse phytochemicals. Interestingly, allistatin is a phytochemical frequently mentioned alongside allicin in research articles on Garlic (Allium sativum) and has been reported to possess interesting therapeutic activities. However, there are no reports on the proper characterization of allistatin or any of its structural information available on public repositories or databases. Moreover, experimental evidence to back up the claims of its therapeutic bioactivities is not available in any accessible literature. All of these have hampered prospective studies with allistatin and possible discoveries of novel therapeutic activities. This review provides a piece of up-to-date information on allistatin and a hypothetical prediction of the nature of its structure from the sparsely available information. Available information on its bioactivities was also reviewed, although very sparse evidence on their mechanism of action. Finally, a pathway towards the complete characterization of allistatin was suggested as a future prospect.</p

Allistatin:A potent yet uncharacterized therapeutic nugget in Allium sativum

Major solutions to human health challenges are encrypted in nature's resources. Despite the focus of contemporary research on characterizing plant natural products and phytochemicals, a vast number of plants are yet to be discovered, or their products functionally characterized. Garlic is one of the most common traditional Chinese medicinal plants and a hub of over 200 diverse phytochemicals. Interestingly, allistatin is a phytochemical frequently mentioned alongside allicin in research articles on Garlic (Allium sativum) and has been reported to possess interesting therapeutic activities. However, there are no reports on the proper characterization of allistatin or any of its structural information available on public repositories or databases. Moreover, experimental evidence to back up the claims of its therapeutic bioactivities is not available in any accessible literature. All of these have hampered prospective studies with allistatin and possible discoveries of novel therapeutic activities. This review provides a piece of up-to-date information on allistatin and a hypothetical prediction of the nature of its structure from the sparsely available information. Available information on its bioactivities was also reviewed, although very sparse evidence on their mechanism of action. Finally, a pathway towards the complete characterization of allistatin was suggested as a future prospect.</p

Recycled waste groundnut oil: A potential feedstock for green energy/biodiesel synthesis

This work focuses on the recycling of waste groundnut oil as a potential feedstock for biodiesel production using activated coconut husk as a regenerating agent. The coconut husk was functionalized using organic acid. The properties of the functionalized coconut husk were investigated via instrumental analysis. Non-parametric modeling involving 2-degree isotherm models were used. The regeneration/recycling of the waste oil were done in batch mode examining key factors of temperature, time, concentration and dosage. Biodiesel was synthesized from recycled waste groundnut oil using transesterification reaction. The properties of biodiesel were examined using ASTM and AOAC official standards. Brunauer-Emmett-Teller surface analysis revealed the surface area of the adsorbent as 371.88 m2/g and a porosity distribution of 0.567 η on the surface at a pH of 6.1. Batch mode analysis revealed that 97.5% of impurities was removed from waste groundnut oil under one batch process at 80 °C after 4 h with 6 g of the activated coconut husk. Langmuir isotherm model provided the best fit to the experimental data with adsorption capacity of 33.5 mg/g at R2 of 0.996. Adsorption of waste groundnut oil impurities onto activated coconut husk was endothermic, as evidenced by the calculated ΔH of +2.7914 kJ/mol. A high cetane number of 48.4 obtained after transesterification is an indication of the good ignition quality of the obtained recycled waste groundnut oil methyl ester. Kinematic viscosity and acid value were revealed to be 4.65 mm2 S−1 and 0.31 mg KOH/g, while the calorific value stood at 38,053 kJ/kg. GC-MS analysis revealed a complex mixture of fatty acid methyl esters dominated by unsaturated fatty acids (58.78%). Recycling of waste cooking oil in this work using activated coconut husk demonstrated good quality as a regenerating agent. The properties of biodiesel obtained showed that it has all the good qualities comparable to other existing biodiesel based on the ASTM and AOAC official standards. More work on the recycling of other waste cooking oils for green energy synthesis to protect our environment from pollution emanating from the use of conventional petro-diesel and promote energy transition is highly recommended