Abstract
Plants are one of a prefect source of natural effective compounds that have antimicrobial, and other activities. This study investigated the activity of the aqueous extract for three wild edible plants (Sonchus oleraceus, Cichorium pumilum, and Portulaca oleracea) at three concentrations (1.5, 2.5 and 5 mg/ml) as antifungal and antitoxigenic. Many functional groups such as alcohols, phenols, alkanes and alkenes, etc were appeared in aqueous extracts by Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) analysis. Where an extract of Portulaca oleracea gave a greater total phenolic and flavonoids were 210.4 ± 1.15 and 36.7 ± 0.79 mg/mL, respectively, followed by Sonchus oleraceus (192.3 ± 2.11 mg/mL) and Cichorium pumilum (186.4 ± 2.18 mg/mL). The results indicated that increasing the concentration of the extract, the area of inhibition zone increased with all treatments, where the highest inhibition zone was observed using 5 mg/ml for Portulaca oleracea extract was 17.1 ± 1.7, 26.5 ± 1.5 and 22.8.±2.3 mm against Aspergillus flavus, Aspergillus ochraceus and Aspergillus parasiticus, respectively, while the lowest antifungal activity was marked with Cichorium pumilum extract with all tested fungi. The results have also indicated that the aqueous extract has inhibited formed of aflatoxin B1 (AFB1) and ochratoxin A (OTA), where the percentages of inhibition AFB1 were 78.03, 68.8 and 81.7% after treated yeast extract sucrose (YES) media by 5 mg crude extract for extract Sonchus oleraceus, Cichorium pumilum and Portulaca oleracea, respectively. In contrast, the inhibitory effect against OTA at the same concentration was 77.5, 72.3, and 85.2% in the same order for plants. Finally, these plants provide an aqueous extract that contains many effective compounds that enable to play the role of antifungal and antitoxigenic.