article · Applied Sciences
Multidrug-resistant pathogens like Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa present significant public health and food safety challenges as conventional antibiotics lose effectiveness. This review explores phytochemicals from edible and medicinal plants as promising alternative antimicrobial agents. These natural compounds, including phenolics and terpenoids, act through various mechanisms such as disrupting cell membranes, inhibiting efflux pumps, and interfering with biofilms. They also offer antioxidant properties and can extend food shelf life. Recent advancements in extraction, characterisation techniques, and artificial intelligence are accelerating the discovery and optimisation of these plant-based antimicrobials. However, significant hurdles remain, including standardisation, bioavailability, clinical translation, and regulatory approval, requiring further research to isolate active compounds and validate their combined use with existing treatments.
The rise of drug-resistant bacteria threatens global health and food security, making existing medicines less effective. This research highlights how natural compounds from plants could provide new ways to combat these dangerous pathogens and safely preserve food, offering a vital alternative to conventional treatments and synthetic preservatives.
This research points towards the development of new antimicrobial agents and natural food preservatives derived from plant phytochemicals. Potential users include the food industry for extending product shelf life and enhancing safety, and the pharmaceutical sector for creating novel treatments against multidrug-resistant infections. While promising, the abstract indicates this is early-stage research, requiring further work on standardisation, bioavailability, clinical validation, and regulatory approval before real-world application.
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Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa rank among the most challenging pathogens due to increasing prevalence of multidrug-resistant (MDR) strains. These pathogens pose major risks to public health and food safety, earning their inclusion on the World Health Organization (WHO) priority list of MDR bacteria. While available conventional antibiotics are becoming less effective, natural products from plant extracts offer promising alternative and synergetic effects that can restore efficacy and lower required doses. Their antimicrobial activity is attributed to phytochemicals such as phenolic compounds and terpenoids acting via membrane disruption, efflux pump inhibition, biofilm interference, and cell protein disruption. Furthermore, phytochemicals in essential oils, such as carvacrol, thymol, and cinnamaldehyde, also exhibit antimicrobial and antioxidant activities. Their broad antimicrobial effects extend shelf life and enhance food safety, making them effective natural alternatives to synthetic preservatives. Moreover, advances in extraction and characterization techniques, including green solvents, spectrometry and hyphenated chromatographic methods, have improved recovery, identification and quantification. In addition, artificial intelligence (AI) emerges as a transformative tool to accelerate discovery, optimize compound screening, and predict synergistic interactions. Notwithstanding these advances, challenges persist in standardization, bioavailability, and clinical translation. Further studies are needed to isolate active compounds, elucidate mechanisms of action, validate combined use with conventional antibiotics and overcome formulation, delivery, sensory and regulatory hurdles. This review examines current knowledge of opportunities and limitations of plant-based antimicrobials against MDR pathogens supported by advances in extraction, characterization, and AI.
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DOI: 10.3390/app16094414
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