Preparation of Extracts
This was carried out as earlier described with
slight modifications3.
The freshly collected stem
bark and fresh mature leaves were chopped into
pieces and shade dried at room temperature
(32-35oC) to constant weight for 5 days.
50g ofeach of the plant parts were coarsely powdered
using a mortar and pestle and were furtherreduced to powder using an electric blender.
The powder was transferred into closed
containers.
Each of the powdered air-dried plant
material was extracted with water, acetone and
ethanol.
25g of each powdered sample was
mixed in a conical flask with 100ml of deionised
distilled water or organic solvent, plugged, then
shaken at 120 rpm for 30 minutes and kept for
24 h.
After 24 h, each of the extracts was filtered
rapidly through four layers of gauge and then by
a more delicate filtration through Whatman no1
filter paper.
The resulting filtrates were then concentrated in a rotary evaporator and subsequently lyophilized to dryness.
The yield of
powder was 51% from water extracts, 32% from
acetone and 17% from ethanol extracts for the
stem bark while the respective values of 49%,
32% and 19% (w/w) were obtained for the
leaves.