Abstract
BackgroundPlants are traditionally used for medicinal treatment of numerous human disorders including infectious diseases caused by microorganisms. Due to the increasing resistance of many pathogens to commonly used antimicrobial agents, there is an urgent need for novel antimicrobial compounds. Plants of the genus Rhododendron belong to the woody representatives of the family Ericaceae, which are typically used in a range of ethno-medical applications. There are more than one thousand Rhododendron species worldwide. The Rhododendron-Park Bremen grows plants representing approximately 600 of the known Rhododendron species, and thus enables research involving almost two thirds of all known Rhododendron species.MethodsTwenty-six bacterial species representing different taxonomic clades have been used to study the antimicrobial potential of Rhododendron leaf extracts. Agar diffusion assay were conducted using 80% methanol crude extracts derived from 120 Rhododendron species. Data were analyzed using principal component analysis and the plant-borne antibacterial activities grouped according the first and second principal components.ResultsThe leaf extracts of 17 Rhododendron species exhibited significant growth-inhibiting activities against Gram-positive bacteria. In contrast, only very few of the leaf extracts affected the growth of Gram-negative bacteria. All leaf extracts with antimicrobial bioactivity were extracted from representatives of the subgenus Rhododendron, with 15 from the sub-section Rhododendron and two belonging to the section Pogonanthum. The use of bacterial multidrug efflux pump mutants revealed remarkable differences in the susceptibility towards Rhododendron leaf extract treatment.ConclusionsFor the first time, our comprehensive study demonstrated that compounds with antimicrobial activities accumulate in the leaves of certain Rhododendron species, which mainly belong to a particular subgenus. The results suggested that common genetic traits are responsible for the production of bioactive secondary metabolite(s) which act primarily on Gram-positive organisms, and which may affect Gram-negative bacteria in dependence of the activity of multidrug efflux pumps in their cell envelope.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12906-015-0596-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Plants are traditionally used for medicinal treatment of numerous human disorders including infectious diseases caused by microorganisms
The antibacterial activity of Rhododendron leaf extracts obtained with MeOH or Ethyl acetate (EtOAc) as solvents was determined and categorized into three classes according to the radius of the inhibition zone: a) extracts of 13 Rhododendron species caused no inhibition, b) 71 extracts caused low inhibition, and c) leaf extracts of 36 Rhododendron species caused inhibition of growth of either E. coli or B. subtilis (Figure 2)
Both tester organisms were generally more susceptible to treatment with the MeOH extracts while the EtOAc extracts showed less antimicrobial effects (Figure 2), indicating that methanol was more suitable to extracting bioactive compound(s) from powdered Rhododendron leaves
Summary
Plants are traditionally used for medicinal treatment of numerous human disorders including infectious diseases caused by microorganisms. Due to the increasing resistance of many pathogens to commonly used antimicrobial agents, there is an urgent need for novel antimicrobial compounds. Medicinal plants have been used as traditional treatments of a variety of human diseases. Bacterial pathogens have developed different types of resistance to antimicrobial agents, thereby causing a significant increase in the costs of diagnostics and pharmaceutical treatments. Increase in morbidity caused by antibiotics-resistant bacteria was recorded in several recent out-breaks such as pneumococcal infections, typhoid fever, and shigellosis in different regions world-wide [8]. The increasing resistance of human pathogens to commonly used antimicrobial agents motivated a renewed interest in the discovery of novel antimicrobial compounds. This is explained by the notion that plants acquired most of their secondary metabolite repertoire during evolution as metabolic byproducts, which serve as defense compounds against predators such as insects and other herbivores, or against pathogens such as bacteria, fungi, or viruses [12,13]
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