Faculty Mentor
Jeanmarie Molina
Major/Area of Research
Biology
Description
The evolution and spread of antibiotic resistance has been the greatest threat to successful antibiotic treatment, and hence the driving force behind the search for new therapies. None of our modern pharmaceutical antibiotics have been developed from plants, albeit plants have been used since antiquity in traditional medicine to fight bacterial infections. We phylogenetically analyzed 138 plant species with antibacterial activity and found 5 plant families that are disproportionately important, with confamilials exerting similar antibacterial mechanisms, as expected due to common ancestry. Myrtaceae (guava family) was shown to inhibit quorum sensing, disrupting bacterial communication implicated in pathogenicity, due to its flavonoids. The unrelated families Fabaceae (bean family), Lamiaceae (mints), Lauraceae (laurel), and Zingiberaceae (ginger family) possessed phytochemicals, mostly essential oils, that affected bacterial cell membrane integrity. Species in these plant families may offer unique natural products that could be developed into new antibiotics. Our study reinforces the utility of the plant phylogeny in drug discovery.
Keywords
Phylogeny, Antibacterial Plants
Included in
The Phylogeny Predicts Potential New Sources of Antibiotics from Plants
The evolution and spread of antibiotic resistance has been the greatest threat to successful antibiotic treatment, and hence the driving force behind the search for new therapies. None of our modern pharmaceutical antibiotics have been developed from plants, albeit plants have been used since antiquity in traditional medicine to fight bacterial infections. We phylogenetically analyzed 138 plant species with antibacterial activity and found 5 plant families that are disproportionately important, with confamilials exerting similar antibacterial mechanisms, as expected due to common ancestry. Myrtaceae (guava family) was shown to inhibit quorum sensing, disrupting bacterial communication implicated in pathogenicity, due to its flavonoids. The unrelated families Fabaceae (bean family), Lamiaceae (mints), Lauraceae (laurel), and Zingiberaceae (ginger family) possessed phytochemicals, mostly essential oils, that affected bacterial cell membrane integrity. Species in these plant families may offer unique natural products that could be developed into new antibiotics. Our study reinforces the utility of the plant phylogeny in drug discovery.