The antimicrobial activity of the total alkaloids from five medicinal plants namely Jatropha curcas, Calotropis procera, Magifera indica, Carica papaya and Psidium guajava, commonly used in northern Nigeria for the treatment of various ailments was evaluated using disc diffusion assay. The extracts were used against three bacterial isolates and two fungal isolates including Staphylococcus aureus, Streptococci, Lactobacillus spp., Actinomycetes and Candida albicans, respectively. The results obtained show that all the plants contains various level of alkaloids and an appreciable level of antimicrobial activities were observed at a concentration level of 6x10 2 µg/cm 3 indicating that the plants could be a potential source of alkaloids that may be used for the treatment of various microbial diseases caused by the tested organisms.

The hole transporting material (HTM) is responsible for selectively transporting holes and blocking electrons which also plays a crucial role in the efficiency and stability of perovskite solar cells (PSCs). Spiro-MeOTAD is the most popular material, which is expensive and can be easily affected by moisture content. There is a need to find an alternative HTM with sufficiently high resistance to moisture content. In this paper, the influence of some parameters with cuprous oxide (Cu2O) as HTM was investigated using a solar cell capacitance simulator (SCAPS). These include the influence of doping concentration and thickness of the absorber layer, the effect of thickness of ETM and HTM as well as electron affinities of ETM and HTM on the performance of the PSCs. From the obtained results, it was found that the concentration of dopant in the absorber layer, the thickness of ETM and HTM and the electron affinity of HTM and ETM affect the performance of the solar cell. The cell performance improves greatly with the reduction of ETM electron affinity and its thickness. Upon optimization of parameters, power conversion efficiency for this device was found to be 20.42% with a current density of 22.26 mAcm-2, voltage of 1.12 V, and fill factor of 82.20%. The optimized device demonstrates an enhancement of 58.80%, 2.25%, 20.40% and 30.23% in PCE, Jsc, FF, and Voc over the initial cell. The results show that Cu2O in lead-based PSC as HTM is an efficient system and an alternative to spiro-MeOTAD.

To authenticate the claims by local users of Citrus x limon (lemon) in the control of some human infections, preliminary phytochemical screening and antimicrobial evaluation of lemon leaf extract was investigated Extraction of plant leaves was performed using successive reflux, with n-hexane, ethyl acetate, ethanol and water as extracting solvents. Ethanol gave the highest percentage yield of 10.93% followed closely by ethyl acetate with 9.42% while water extract gave the lowest yield of 3.67%. 11 phytochemicals classes were present in the leaf extract and they include alkaloids, flavonoids, saponins, anthraquinon, cardiac glycosides, tannins, steroids, terpenes, resins, phenols

Metal nanoparticles have demonstrated outstanding properties in photovoltaic devices through introducing localized surface plasmon effects. The performance of Perovskite solar cell (PSC) by incorporating Ag@P4VP NPs was investigated systematically. The plasmonic enhancement effects are explored based on the combination of UV-visible absorption spectroscopy and Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). The performance, especially the short circuit current density (Jsc), and open circuit voltage (Voc) of the PSC containing Ag@P4VP NPs was significantly affected. The power conversion efficiency (PCE), Jsc and Vocof the reference device shows a value of 3.80 %, 11.04 mAcm−2 and 0.85 V. Upon introducing AgNPs@P4VP, a PCE of 5.69 %, Jsc of 12.61 mAcm−2 and Voc of 0.88 V were recorded, which improved the PCE ∼ 39.4 % over that of the standard device. The improvement is attributed to an increase in photocurrent density due to enhanced light harvesting by silver nanoparticles.

The antibacterial properties of K. senegalensis stem bark extract can be harnessed for the production of new antibiotics or the enhancement of already existing antibiotics.