Bioactive potential of Seagrass bacteria against human bacterial pathogens

The discovery of drugs from natural sources is an increasing trend. Researchers are searching for more novel chemical entities, in the hope they will provide new leads for disease treatment. The marine environment is particularly interesting for researchers because of the harsh physical and chemical conditions experienced by many organisms; yet despite this and the biodiversity of the oceans far outweighing terrestrial biodiversity research in this area remains in its infancy.
In particular, marine plants are known to produce a large number of structurally diverse secondary metabolites. Seagrasses are the only angiosperms to successfully grow in sub-tidal and tidal conditions. Several species of Seagrass have obligate microbial populations within their roots, leaves and rhizomes. Some medicines and chemicals are already prepared from Seagrasses and their associates.
An even greater concern than bacteria which are resistant to a single antibiotic is bacteria which are resistant to multiple antibiotics. As antibiotic resistance has developed, researchers have developed alternative antibiotics and combination therapies. However, the constant overuse of antibiotics in humans and their livestock has led to many bacteria being resistant to many antibiotics. The problem of resistance demands renewed efforts to seek antibacterial agents effective against pathogenic bacteria.
Two species of Seagrass from the SE coast of India were sampled and returned to the lab under sterile conditions, for the isolation of epiphytic and endophytic heterotrophic bacteria. 32 strains of endo/epiphytic bacteria were tested for their antagonistic activities against 5 antibiotic resistant human pathogens, of these, 10 were found to be antagonistic against one or more human pathogens. The authors go on to discuss the minimum inhibitory concentrations (MIC) as well as minimum bacterial concentrations (MBC) for the 32 tested strains.
The outcome of this research is that the endophytic bacteria isolated from the Seagrasses showed maximum sensitivity against several of the human pathogens compared with the epiphytic bacteria. And also that the bioactive compounds from the endophytic bacteria show maximum sensitivity with MIC than the bioactive compounds from the epiphytic bacteria.
From the outcomes of this research steps have been taken to find out the reason for the maxium activity of endophytic bacteria from Seagrasses.

There were two main reasons I choose to review this paper 1) The use of natural sources in the fight against humans pathogens is something that I find interesting and 2) In another module I have studies Seagrasses and like to see an over-lap/relation between modules. That being said, I found this paper very hard to read. It appears to me that the authors first language is defiantly not English, the paper did not read smoothly and the sentences seemed very disjointed, this I feel should have been addressed further. There were also seemingly simple mistakes made, for example species names were not italicised – I think these should have been picked up on. Simple changes would have made for a better read.
Despite this, the results of the paper are encouraging and the above mentioned points shouldn’t distract from the outcome. I hope that more antibiotics which can be used against both human and animal pathogens are found, as the problem of antibiotic resistance does appear to be rising.

A review of:
Ravikumar, S., Thajuddin, N., Suganthi, P., Inbaneson, S. J. and Vinodkumar, T. (2010) Bioactive potential of seagraa bacteria against human bacterial pathogens. Journal of Environmental Biology. 31 387-389.