Ethnomedicine Study of Tengger People of Ngadas Village in Malang, East Java, Indonesia: In Search of Antimicrobial Plants

Background: New antimicrobial substances are increasingly needed to face issues of antibacterial resistance, and plants are one of the potential sources of these substances. The Tengger people of East Java, Indonesia empirically possess the knowledge of medicinal plants that need to be documented and assessed further for their potencies. Objectives: This study aimed to find plants with the potency of antimicrobial activity, by quantifying ethnomedicinal data from The Tengger people. Materials and Methods: In this study, snowball sampling was chosen as the sampling method. Information about medicinal plants was obtained by interview with a semi-structured questionnaire, and four indices namely: ethnobotanical richness, use-value index, fidelity level, and knowledge value index were used for quantifying the information gathered from the respondents. Results: The results showed that four plants had prominent values of indices, which were adas (Foeniculum vulgare Mill.), jambu wer (Prunus persica (L.) Batsch), sempretan (Eupatorium sp.), and kayu ampet (Astronia macrophylla L.). Those four plants were recognized by The Tengger people for their medicinal properties, which were anti-diarrhea (jambu wer and sempretan), cough reliever (adas), and wound remedies (sempretan). Conclusion: The plants had the potency to be explored further for their antimicrobial activity. Further exploration is needed to find new active compounds responsible for antimicrobial activity.