Abstract
Infectious diseases that are caused by bacteria are an important cause of mortality and morbidity in all regions of the world. Bacterial drug resistance has grown in the last decades, but the rate of discovery of new antibiotics has steadily decreased. Therefore, the search for new effective antibacterial agents has become a top priority. The plant kingdom seems to be a deep well for searching for novel antimicrobial agents. This is due to the many attractive features of plants: they are readily available and cheap, extracts or compounds from plant sources often demonstrate high-level activity against pathogens, and they rarely have severe side effects. The huge variety of plant-derived compounds provides very diverse chemical structures that may supply both the novel mechanisms of antimicrobial action and provide us with new targets within the bacterial cell. In addition, the rapid development of modern biotechnologies opens up the way for obtaining bioactive compounds in environmentally friendly and low-toxic conditions. In this short review, we ask the question: do antibacterial agents derived from plants have a chance to become a panacea against infectious diseases in the “post-antibiotics era”.
Highlights
Since ancient times, people have used various plants and their derivatives for medical purposes, including the treatment of infectious diseases
We propose the following question: taking into account the current trends in science, are there the prerequisites for the transition from the era of antibiotics of microbial origin and their derivatives to the era of "plant antimicrobials"?
It was demonstrated that plant-derived compounds could have significant anti-mycobacterial activity against M. tuberculosis, confirming that phytochemicals could be useful as ancillary solutions to control this infection
Summary
People have used various plants and their derivatives for medical purposes, including the treatment of infectious diseases. Modern science, using its newest approaches of high-performance and large-scale screening, offers new ways to detect novel metabolites produced even by well-known plants Another clear advance is the possibility of producing large quantities of bioactive substances while using modern gene engineering approaches or chemical synthesis methods. In this short review, we propose the following question: taking into account the current trends in science, are there the prerequisites for the transition from the era of antibiotics of microbial origin and their derivatives to the era of "plant antimicrobials"?
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