Standardization and Preliminary Phytochemical Investigation of the Fruits of Grewia asiatica Linn.

Grewia asiatica is a small deciduous tree consisting of ripe fruits, seeds, flowers, bark and leaves of the plant belonging to family Tiliaceae. In present study, various standardization parameters of fruits like macroscopical, microscopical characters, physicochemical parameters like total ash (5.16%), water soluble ash (2.5%), acid insoluble ash (1%), sulphated ash (0.66%), loss on drying (8.3%), swelling index (0.1), foaming index (less than 100), successive extractive values in various solvents like petroleum ether (1.6%), benzene (2.1%), chloroform (2.6%), ethyl acetate (3.7%), methanol (30.9%). Cold Maceration values, petroleum ether (3%), benzene (3.3%), chloroform (4%), ethyl acetate (4.3%), methanol (45.6%). Behaviour on treatment with different chemical reagents of the dried fruits, fluorescence characters under visible and ultralviolet light were studied to fix some pharmacognostic parameters that vary from region to region. Preliminary phytochemical studies on different extracts were reported.