Promising Antimicrobials from Natural Products

DERITA, M.; SEIMANDI, G; BUTASSI, E.; DI LIBERTO, M.; CORDISCO, E.; BLANC, A.; SORTINO, M.; SVETAZ, L.

Springer Nature Switzerland AG

Lugar: Cham; Año: 2022 p. 39

978-3-030-83503-3

Fungal species are able to carry out benefcial actions on industrial pro-cesses that directly affect human being wellness. They can also be the cause ofsevere pathologies both in humans or food products. Fungicidal agents currentlyused to treat human or plant pathogens have many drawbacks after prolonged orinappropriate use, proving to be ineffcient in a short term. Therefore, academicsand the pharmaceutical or agrochemical industries are constantly encouraged tosearch for new chemical entities with antifungal action. In this sense, taking advan-tage of secondary plant metabolites to fnd out antifungal molecules could be ofhigh interest. During the last 20 years, we have constituted a group of scientists thatbroach the subject related to antifungal products obtained from vegetable sources,and we have assayed hundreds of plant species and a considerable number of natu-ral metabolites isolated from them, against the main fungal pathogens that affecthumans and crops. The aim of this chapter is to update the plants that have demon-strated the best antifungal action during this period of time and the natural com-pounds responsible for this. In addition, new strategies like the evaluation ofphotoactive species and synergism, as well as comparisons with results obtained byother authors reported in the literature, will be discussed.