Abstract
Foodborne bacterial pathogens in consumed foods are major food safety concerns worldwide, leading to serious illness and even death. An exciting strategy is to use novel phenolic compounds against bacterial pathogens based on recruiting the inducible metabolic responses of plant endogenous protective defense against biotic and abiotic stresses. Such stress-inducible phenolic metabolites have high potential to reduce bacterial contamination, and particularly improve safety of plant foods. The stimulation of plant protective response by inducing biosynthesis of stress-inducible phenolics with antimicrobial properties is among the safe and effective strategies that can be targeted for plant food safety and human gut health benefits. Metabolically driven elicitation with physical, chemical, and microbial elicitors has shown significant improvement in the biosynthesis of phenolic metabolites with antimicrobial properties in food and medicinal plants. Using the above rationale, this review focuses on current advances and relevance of metabolically driven elicitation strategies to enhance antimicrobial phenolics in plant food models for bacterial-linked food safety applications. Additionally, the specific objective of this review is to explore the potential role of redox-linked pentose phosphate pathway (PPP) regulation for enhancing biosynthesis of stress-inducible antibacterial phenolics in elicited plants, which are relevant for wider food safety and human health benefits.
Highlights
The promising results from these previous studies suggested that metabolically relevant elicitation is a safe and effective strategy to enhance biosynthesis of secondary metabolites including stress-inducible phenolics in plant models through stimulation of protective proline-associated pentose phosphate pathway (PAPPP), which can be rationally recruited for food safety and ity [76,77,78]
Roots of hydroponically grown plants were treated with 0.1% acetate and 0.1% chitosan, and it was found that the number of plant species that displayed antimicrobial activity against S. aureus subsp. aureus, E. coli
There are many published studies on elicitation strategies that focus on improving the organoleptic properties and the phenolic content or profile of food plants and plant-based foods, with the goal of enhancing their shelf-life as well as other bioactive properties that have human health relevant benefits
Summary
Under exposure to biotic and abiotic stresses, plants produce a diverse group of secondary compounds with antimicrobial potential. Plant phenolics are broadly divided into simple phenolics that include phenolic acids (hydroxycinnamic acids and hydroxybenzoic acids) and coumarins, and polyphenols that include flavonoids (flavones, flavonols, isoflavonols, flavanones, flavanols, anthocyanins, and chalcones) and non-flavonoids (tannins, lignans, and stilbenes) [23] These stress-inducible phenolic metabolites have diverse biological functions that are involved in plant–insect, plant–microorganism and plant–plant interactions and provide protection to the plant against biotic and abiotic stresses [24]. In addition to antimicrobial activity, plant phenolic compounds have other human health relevant pharmacological properties such as antioxidant, anti-hyperglycemic, and anti-hypertensive functions based on their active role in human metabolism as well as their indirect functions through gut microbe modulation, which potentially help to prevent and manage NCDs such as type 2 diabetes or hypertension [3,4,22,27,28]. Plant secondary metabolites can alter gene expression and protein biosynthesis, among other vital cellular activities, and can exhibit antimicrobial functions through signal transduction processes or modulation of cellular targets [29]
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