Abstract
The bacteriostatic and/or bactericidal properties of few phosphoramide-based amphiphilic compounds on human pathogenic bacteria were previously reported. In this study, the potential of two cationic (BSV36 and KLN47) and two zwitterionic (3 and 4) amphiphiles as inhibitors of marine bacterial growth and biofilm formation were investigated. Results showed that the four compounds have little impact on the growth of a panel of 18 selected marine bacteria at a concentration of 200 µM, and up to 700 µM for some bacterial strains. Interestingly, cationic lipid BSV36 and zwitterionic lipids 3 and 4 effectively disrupt biofilm formation of Paracoccus sp. 4M6 and Vibrio sp. D02 at 200 µM and to a lesser extent of seven other bacterial strains tested. Moreover, ecotoxicological assays on four species of microalgae highlighted that compounds 3 and 4 have little impact on microalgae growth with EC50 values of 51 µM for the more sensitive species and up to 200 µM for most of the others. Amphiphilic compounds, especially zwitterionic amphiphiles 3 and 4 seem to be promising candidates against biofilm formation by marine bacteria.
Graphical abstract
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Acknowledgements
DM has received a Ph.D. scholarship from the Université Bretagne Occidentale (3M doctoral school) and Ifremer. The authors would also like to thank BIODIMAR platform for providing technical support. We are deeply grateful to ‘Laboratoire de Biotechnologie et chimie marine’ for providing access to the bacteria strain collection, to Dorian Lescure who set up and performed the experiments to test ecotoxicity of BSV36 on microalgae and to Dr. Maria El Rakwe who helped developing statistical analysis on R software.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).