Review
Plant lectins: A new antimicrobial frontier

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopha.2022.113735Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Pathogenic bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites frequently change to ensure survival.

  • Several microbes have adopted strict and intricate strategies to fight drugs that are made to kill them.

  • These strategic changes in microbes lead to microbes’ resistance.

  • Plant lectins are carbohydrates-binding proteins which could recognize microbes' outer membrane glycans and may kill them.

  • This review discusses the possible future applications of plant lectins as antimicrobial.

Abstract

Pathogenic bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites, and other microbes constantly change to ensure survival. Several pathogens have adopted strict and intricate strategies to fight medical treatments. Many drugs, frequently prescribed to treat these pathogens, are becoming obsolete and ineffective. Because pathogens have gained the capacity to tolerate or resist medications targeted at them, hence the term antimicrobial resistance (AMR), in that regard, many natural compounds have been routinely used as new antimicrobial agents to treat infections. Thus, plant lectins, the carbohydrate-binding proteins, have been targeted as promising drug candidates. This article reviewed more than 150 published papers on plant lectins with promising antibacterial and antifungal properties. We have also demonstrated how some plant lectins could express a synergistic action as adjuvants to boost the efficacy of obsolete or abandoned antimicrobial drugs. Emphasis has also been given to their plausible mechanism of action. The study further reports on the immunomodulatory effect of plant lectins and how they boost the immune system to curb or prevent infection.

Keywords

Plant
Lectins
Bacteria
Fungal
Infection
Antimicrobial
Immunomodulatory
Adjuvant

Data availability

No data was used for the research described in the article.

Cited by (0)

1

Equal contribution.