CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL STUDIES ON SOME MEDICINAL LEGUNINACES

This dissertation is divided into sections (chapters). The three chapters (from two to four) are dedicated fro each subfamily of the family leguminosae, whereas the remaining two (chapter first and last) cover the introduction of subfamilies of the family leguminosae and biological studies on their plants, respectively.The first chapter delineate the characteristic feature of the family leguminosae, the various genera and species of the subfamilies with their important representative.The second chapter outlines the subfamily Faboideae. A member of this family named as Lotus garcinii and the compounds isolated from this plant have been described which include acyclic diterpenoids, saturated fatty acids, common steroids, triterpenoids and some unusual compounds.Tamarindus indica, a member of the subfamily caesalpinioideae was also investigated due to the reason that that leaves of this plants show the amazing phenomenan known as chemotrpism and this was solved by the parallel chemical and biological studies on the leaves which were collected during day and night timesIn the fourth chapter the results are described which were obtained when prosopis juliflora, a member of subfamily mimosoideae, was explored phytochemically. As a results of this investigation , an acyclic diterpenoid, pentacyclic triterpenoid, common steroids and an alkaloid belonging to the class piperidine have been isolated and characterized.In the last chapter, the various plants of the family leguminosae which were collected during the summer season around the city (Karachi) were subjected to extraction and studies for antifungal and antibacterial activity. The promising results obtained from the biological activities have been discussed in this chapter. Structures of the naturally occurring isolated compounds from different medicinal plants were characterized through various spectroscopic methods including 2D NMR spectroscopy