Soil protein as a potential antimicrobial agent against methicillin -resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

Environ Res

Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Mendel University in Brno, Zemedelska 1, CZ-613 00, Brno, Czech Republic; Central European Institute of Technology, Brno University of Technology, Purkynova 123, CZ-612 00, Brno, Czech Republic. Electronic address:

Published: September 2020

Recently, the interest is increasing to find alternatives to replace the usage of antibiotics since their massive and improper usage enhance the antibiotic resistance in human pathogens. In this study, for the first time we showed that the soil proteins have very high antibacterial activity (98% of growth inhibition) against methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), one of the most threatening human pathogens. We found that the protein extract (C3) from the forest with past intensive management showed higher antibacterial activity than that of unmanaged forest. The MIC and IC were found to be 30 and 15.0 μg protein g dry soil respectively. C3 was found to kill the bacteria by cell wall disruption and genotoxicity which was confirmed by optical and fluorescent microscopy and comet assay. According to qPCR study, the mecA (the antibiotic resistant gene) expression in MRSA was found to be down-regulated after C3 treatment. In contrast, C3 showed no hemolytic toxicity on human red blood cells which was confirmed by hemolytic assay. According to ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (UHPLC-MS), 144 proteins were identified in C3 among which the majority belonged to Gram negative bacteria (45.8%). Altogether, our results will help to develop novel, cost-effective, non-toxic and highly efficient antibacterial medicines from natural sources against antibiotic resistant infections.

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Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2020.109320DOI Listing

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