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Plant-derived bioactive compounds at sub-lethal concentrations: towards smart biocide-free antibiofilm strategies

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Abstract

Biofilm resistance to biocides is becoming a global issue with an impact on many fields, including health care, agriculture, the environment, society and industry. Plants offer a virtually inexhaustible and sustainable resource of very interesting classes of biologically active, low-molecular-weight compounds (parvome). In the past, the plant parvomes were screened mainly for their lethal effects, disregarding concentrations and ecologically relevant functions of these molecules in the natural context. Testing sub-lethal concentrations of plant-derived compounds mimicking environmental levels may be critical to reveal mechanisms subtler than the killing activity, e.g. those influencing the multicellular behavior, offering an elegant way to develop novel biocide-free antibiofilm strategies. In a cross-disciplinary fashion, we illustrated recent successes of sub-lethal concentrations of plant-derived compounds, their ecological insight, pro et contra, future directions and impacts, envisioning implications for policy making and resource management.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the German DAAD and the Italian CRUI in the framework of the Vigoni project 2012 “Seagrass compounds inhibit biofilm formation—from the identification to the application”.

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  1. Dipartimento di Scienze per gli Alimenti, la Nutrizione e l’Ambiente, Università degli Studi di Milano, via Celoria 2, 20133, Milan, Italy

    Federica Villa & Francesca Cappitelli

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  1. Federica Villa
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  2. Francesca Cappitelli
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Correspondence to Francesca Cappitelli.

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Villa, F., Cappitelli, F. Plant-derived bioactive compounds at sub-lethal concentrations: towards smart biocide-free antibiofilm strategies. Phytochem Rev 12, 245–254 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11101-013-9286-4

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