Antifungal Activity of Red Dragon Peel (Hylocereus polyrhizus)
ⓒ Rudi Hendra et al 2020 IOP Conf. Ser.: Mater. Sci. Eng. 833 012014
STATE THE HYPOTHESIS (In if-then format):
Plants, when extracted, can produce dyes and the extracts have been used for different purposes such as the textile or food industry [1]. One potential plant that can be used as a natural dye is dragon fruit (Hylocereus cacti) or by another name Pitaya. Wybraniec and coworkers reported that dragon fruit has a potential as a source to produce red pigment and it's called betalains [2]. Betalain is a water-soluble pigment that gives color to flowers and fruits. Betalain pigments are divided into two groups, namely betacyanin which produces purplish red and betaxanthin which produce yellow-orange colors [2, 3].
In the dragon fruit peel, it is also containing pigments which are usually only discarded as food waste and have not been used optimally. This is very unfortunate because the fruit of the dragon fruit itself has several advantages. According to Wu et al. (2006), the peel possessed polyphenol compounds with antioxidant activities [4]. Whereas according to Rahmawati (2016), the peel contains betacyanin, flavonoids, and phenol. Also, dragon fruit skin contains some vitamins, terpenoids, flavonoids, thiamine, niacin, pyridoxine, cobalamin, phenolic, carotene, and phytoalbumin which are thought to have antioxidant benefits and can also be potential for antimicrobial activities [5]. From previous studies, the fruit possessed antimicrobial activities against pathogenic microbial with different assay [6, 7]. Nowadays, there is growing interest in pharmaceutical industries to investigate plants as a source of active compounds with fewer side effects to human especially in combating infection diseases [8, 9].
Due to these facts, the exploration of new alternative medicines derived from plants is required. Flavonoids are one of phenolic group which has antimicrobial activity [10]. These compounds act to inhibit
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