Traditional knowledge and Ayurveda in India is being used since time immemorial to cure dreadful diseases and now has been recognized internationally. Plants are known to have many antimicrobial properties. In India, use of medicinal plants has been known since the Vedic period. The various plants used in the experiment have numerous medicinal properties. Research in this field is highly important because it has various benefits. These include lower incidences of adverse reactions to plant products as compared to pharmaceutical products and lower costs of drugs. The two plants used were Tulsi (Ocimum sanctum) and neem( Azadirachta indica). The extracts of the two plants were tested against Staphylococcus aureus, a gram positive coccal bacteria. Based on a disk diffusion method, the antimicrobial activity of the plants was tested. The zone of inhibition of neem was found to be more than tulsi. This study is thus successful in identifying plants with different antimicrobial activity, so that they can be further exploited for isolation and characterisation to treat various harmful and infectious diseases, especially due to prevalence of drug resistant microbes and the need to produce more effective and lethal microbial agents.
