European Journal of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences

STAINING REACTION OF ETHANOLIC EXTRACT OF CINNAMOMUM TAMALA IN PROKARYOTES AND EUKARYOTES

Prianka Dikhar, Soumali Sadhukhan and Satadal Das*

ABSTRACT

Cinnamomum tamala leaves are widely used as spices in foods while they also have many other biological and medicinal activities. There is a short list of few natural products which are commonly used for staining of biological materials. Extract of these leaves was not studied as a staining agent. Thus in this experiment we explored staining reactions of the ethanolic extract of the leaves on different biological materials with an expectation to find out whether it can be used as a staining agent for biological materials. Although all prokaryotes studied failed to take a positive staining reaction except Salmonella and Acinetobacter, it showed good staining reactions with many eukaryotic epithelial tissue, starch granules and fungi. The most interesting finding was a metachromatic and differential staining reaction of human tissue in histological sections, where all epithelial tissue became red in colour while all connective tissue became deep bluish green in colour. Again it failed to stain the tumour tissue indicating a new way to differentiate normal tissue from cancerous tissue. Thus the findings revealed many possible use of this extract as a stain in future for identification of cells and for diagnosis of human diseases. Further studies may reveal many other biological property of this extract as a stain which are hitherto unknown at present.

Keywords: Cinnamomum tamala, biological stain, histological tissue.