Papers Gallery

Moreover, the lowest to moderate antimicrobial activity observed for other extracts can be explained by the weaker concentration of minor polarity compounds due to the mode of preparation of the tested extracts that did not contain metabolites, such as unsaturated fatty acids, which have been reported to possess good antimicrobial activity (Pauli 2001) that’s why, we performed our analysis with GC-MS analysis in order to identify the bioactive compounds in ethanol extract of C.scolymus. According to Zheng et al. (2005) ,the anti-bacterial actions of fatty acids are usually attributed to long chain unsaturated fatty acids. Some compounds of sesquiterpenes especially farnesan identified by GC-MS are known to possess anti-bacterial activity, (Zheng et al. 2005). Moreover, the antibacterial activity was suspected to be associated with the presence of 2-Hexyl-1-decanol and 2-Butyl-1-octanol, according to Boussaada et al. (2008), fractions rich in long chain alcohols were particularly active against Gram-positive bacteria.
However, it is noteworthy that the composition of the volatile compounds and phenolic compounds from a particular species of plant can widely differ depending upon the harvesting seasons, extraction method and geographical origin, while in the composition of their components to considerable extent different parts of the same plant can also differ widely (Aeschbach et al. 1994).
Tunisian Cynara solymus based antimicrobials have enormous therapeutic potential as they can serve the purpose with lesser side effects that are often associated with synthetic antimicrobials. Continued further exploration of plant- derived antimicrobials is needed
today. Further research is necessary to determine the identity of the antibacterial compounds from within these plants and also to determine their full spectrum of efficacy.