Abstract

A REVIEW ON BANANA BLOSSOM: THE HEART OF BANANA

Pushpaveni C.*, Visagaperumal D. and Vineeth Chandy

Abstract

The banana plant is treelike a perennial herb. It’s a herbaceous flowering plant belonging to the genus Musa and the family Musaceae. It has an edible fruit and plant has no much use after harvesting the fruits, but researchers say that even the other parts of the plant like stems, leaves, and flowers have nutritional and medicinal uses. This review focuses mainly on the banana flowers and the ethnobotanical uses states that the banana flower is used for various activities like immunomodulatory potential, anthelmintic, antiulcer, antioxidant, anticancer, antibacterial, antidiabetic, and anti HIV activity. Apart from the medicinal uses the flower is also used as vegetable by the people all over the world, hence for this reason Banana flowers are known as Banana hearts. The aim of this review is to explore the pharmacological studies on banana blossoms. This paper also focuses on the nutrition value and phytochemical constituents of the banana blossom which is helpful for developing new generic medicines for certain uncontrollable diseases.

Keywords: Musa acuminata, banana blossoms, bioactive constituents, nutrition value.