Bioactive Molecule from sp. Mitigates MDR in Zebrafish Infection Model.

The emergence and spread of multi-drug resistant (MDR) especially carbapenem-resistant is a major emerging threat to public health, leading to excess in mortality rate as high as 50-86%. MDR manifests all broad mechanisms of drug resistance, hence development of new drugs to treat MDR infection has become a more relevant question in the scientific community. In the present study a potential sp. ASK2 was isolated from rhizosphere soil of medicinal plant. The multistep HPLC purification identified the active principle exhibiting antagonistic activity against MDR . The purified compound was found to be an aromatic compound with aliphatic side chain molecule having a molecular weight of 444.43 Da. FT-IR showed the presence of OH and C=O as functional groups. The bioactive compound was further evaluated for drug induced toxicity and efficacy in adult zebrafish infection model. As this is the first study on - zebrafish model, the infectious doses to manifest sub-clinical and clinical infection were optimized. Furthermore, the virulence of in planktonic and biofilm state was studied in zebrafish. The MTT assay of culture of zebrafish liver reveals non-toxic nature of the proposed ASK2 compound at an effective dose. Moreover, significant increase in survival rate of infected zebrafish suggests that ASK2 compound from a new strain of sp. was potent in mitigating MDR infection.