Malaria, caused by plasmodium parasite, is at the moment the highest cause of morbidity and mortality in the tropics. Recently, there is increasing efforts to develop more potent antimalarials from plant sources that will have little or no adverse effects. This study is aimed at investigating the in vivo mice antimalarial and in vitro antiplasmodial effects of two Meliaceae plants commonly used in Nigerian ethnomedicine as part of recipe for treating malaria infection: Chukrasia tabularis and Turraea vogelii. Hot water decoction and methanol extract of both plants were evaluated for their antimalarial activity in vivo using the mice model assay and in vitro using the parasite lactate dehydrogenase (pLDH) assay. The extracts were also assessed for toxicity with brine shrimp lethality assay and in mammalian cell lines using the neural red assay. The in vivo mice model antimalarial study showed that the methanol extract of the stem bark of C. tabularis exhibited the highest % chemosuppression (83.65 ± 0.66) at the highest dosage administered (800 mg/kg) when compared with chloroquine diphosphate, the standard reference drug which had a % suppression of 90.36 ± 0.04 (p < 0.05). The in vitro antiplasmodial study indicated that the aqueous extract of the stem bark of C. tabularis displayed good activity against Plasmodium falciparum chloroquine-sensitive (D6) strain (IC50 of 10.739 μg/mL) and chloroquine-resistant (W2) strain. Chloroquine and artemisinin had <0.163 and <0.0264, respectively.
Keywords: Antimalarial property; Meliaceae; Parasite lactate dehydrogenase (pLDH) assay; Plasmodium berghei; Plasmodium falciparum.