Department of Clinical & Biological Sciences, University of Torino, Turin, Italy.
Future Microbiol. 2012 Aug;7(8):979-90. doi: 10.2217/fmb.12.68.
The increasing incidence of drug-resistant pathogens has drawn the attention of the pharmaceutical and scientific communities towards studies on the potential antimicrobial activity of plant-derived substances, an untapped source of antimicrobial chemotypes, which are used in traditional medicine in different countries. The aim of this review is to provide recent insights regarding the possibilities of the most important natural antimicrobial compounds derived from plant sources containing a wide variety of secondary metabolites, which are useful as alternative strategies to control infectious diseases. This review will focus on natural plant products as a useful source of antimicrobial molecules, active in particular, on bacteria and fungi. When considering that many of these compounds, which have been used for centuries, are a source of new drugs and that there are ever-increasing technical breakthroughs, it can be envisaged that in the next years some different molecules discovered by ingenious screening programs and obtained from different plant oils and extracts will become useful therapeutic tools.
耐药病原体的发病率不断上升，引起了制药和科学界的关注，促使人们对植物来源物质的潜在抗菌活性进行研究，这些物质是抗菌化学型的未开发来源，在不同国家的传统医学中被使用。本综述的目的是提供最近的研究进展，了解从植物来源中提取的最重要的天然抗菌化合物的可能性，这些化合物含有多种具有抗菌作用的次生代谢产物，可作为控制传染病的替代策略。本综述将重点介绍天然植物产物作为抗菌分子的有用来源，特别是针对细菌和真菌。考虑到这些化合物中有许多已经使用了几个世纪，是新药的来源，并且技术突破不断增加，可以设想，在未来几年，通过巧妙的筛选计划从不同的植物油和提取物中发现的一些不同的分子将成为有用的治疗工具。
