____________________________________________________________________________________________ *Corresponding author: Email: arifullahmd@gmail.com; Annual Research & Review in Biology 4(13): 2088-2132, 2014 SCIENCEDOMAIN international www.sciencedomain.org A Review on Malaysian Plants Used for Screening of Antimicrobial Activity Mohammed Arifullah 1* , Paritala Vikram 1 , Kishore Kumar Chiruvella 2 , Munvar Miya Shaik 3 and Ilfah Husna B. Abdullah Ripain 1 1 Faculty of Agrobased Industry, Universiti Malaysia Kelantan, Jeli Campus, Locked bag-100, 17600, Jeli, Kelantan, Malaysia. 2 Department of Molecular Biosciences, Stockholm University, Sweden. 3 Human Genome Centre, School of Medical Sciences, University Sains Malaysia, 16150 Kubang Kerian, Kelantan, Malaysia. Authors’ contributions This work was carried out in collaboration between all authors. Author MA initiated the idea of writing this review article, supervised, made all the alignments, corrections and proof reading to the script, author PV studied and drafted most of article, Author KKC drafted the antimicrobial methods part and table, Author MMS helped in tabulating the entire data for table 1 and Author IHBAR helped in data collection and reference management. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. Received 7 th December 2013 Accepted 13 rd February 2014 Published 18 th March 2014 ABSTRACT Medicinal plants have very high potential as antimicrobial drugs for treating various human diseases. Although a number of plants have been screened, the search for antimicrobial substances from plants is continued as better and safer drugs to combat bacterial and fungal infections are still needed. Here, we attempted to summarize the antibacterial and antifungal properties of Malaysian medicinal plant extracts against a diverse range of organisms evaluated by disc diffusion and agar well diffusion techniques. Altogether, we provide information on a total of 93 medicinal plants used traditionally in Malaysia for antimicrobial screening during the last 4 years. We believe this combination of insights would provide information of medicinal plants (extracts) containing various secondary metabolites which are effective in controlling infectious diseases. This review also might be of great interest for researchers in isolation and separation of bioactive compounds existing in plant extracts by purification methods. Review Article