• Question: would natural antimicrobials may have a lower chance of being effective towards bacterial infections due to them coming from environments where there is a lot of bacteria already?

    Asked by alyssa on 15 Nov 2021.
    • Photo: Magdalena Sutcliffe

      Magdalena Sutcliffe answered on 15 Nov 2021:

      I am not sure if this is directly answering your question… There are a lot of natural anti-microbial compounds, often produced by plants and fungi, the most known example being penicillin. Some of them are very potent but they are also often further chemically modified to improve their properties such as stability and solubility. If you think about obtaining anti-microbial compounds from a natural source, for example getting penicillin from penicillin mould, you run into a risk of including various contaminations, such as other chemical compounds produced by the mould, and only getting a very low amount of you active compound. This could result in a natural penicillin from mould being less effective than one in a tablet that you get from a pharmacy.

    • Photo: Isabelle Storer

      Isabelle Storer answered on 17 Nov 2021:

      If a certain species of bacteria lived somewhere where there are lots of other species of bacteria, it may have evolved specific methods of defending itself due to the selective pressures. These methods may include synthesising compounds to kill the competing bacteria, so may actually be a good source of new antimicrobial peptides.

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