Plants are the basic source of knowledge of modern medicine. The increased worldwide interest in medicinal plants reflects the value of natural products in health care. The relatively low incidence of adverse reactions to plant preparations compared to modern pharmaceuticals to consider plant medicines as alternatives to synthetic drugs. People are becoming increasingly interested in medicinal plants because of their good therapeutic performance and low toxicity. Some plant extracts are believed to have strong antioxidant effects. Increased use of plant extracts in food, cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries suggest that in order to find the active compound a systematic study of medicinal plants is very important. Many Indian plants are considered as potential source of antioxidant compounds. Hence investigations have been taken up for which four common medicinal plants have been selected i.e, Drumstick, Tamarind, Custard apple and Mint to study their potential antioxidant activity using crude ethanol, aqueous and chloroform extracts of the plants. Antioxidant assays such as superoxide radical scavenging, DPPH and FRAP analysis for the plant extracts by spectrophotometric methods using known standard oxidants as reference were performed. The study reveals that Tamarind has the highest antioxidant activity followed by Mint.
