| | |
Summary: 1504 VOLUME 24 NUMBER 12 DECEMBER 2006 NATURE BIOTECHNOLOGY
Prospects for plant-derived antibacterials
Kim Lewis & Frederick M Ausubel
Can weakly active phytochemicals be combined synergistically to produce new antibacterial treatments?
The scarcity of disease in wild plants indi-
cates that the success of plant defense
mechanisms in combating pathogen infection
rivals that of mammalian immune systems.
Although there are some interesting parallels
between plant and animal defense strategies--
for instance, both groups sacrifice infected tis-
sues through apoptosis; produce numerous
antimicrobial peptides; and attack microbes by
creating an acidic environment,hydrogen per-
oxide and iron chelators--the similarities end
there.Instead of pathogen-specific,somatically
generated antibodies,plants evolved a relatively
limited array of genomically encoded receptors
to recognize specific pathogens,and developed
an enormous variety of small-molecule anti-
|
