Insights into antibiofilm mechanisms of phytochemicals: Prospects in the food industry

Abstract

The recalcitrance of microbial aggregation or biofilm in the food industry underpins the emerging antimicrobial resistance among foodborne pathogens, exacerbating the phenomena of food spoilage, processing and safety management failure, and the prevalence of foodborne illnesses. The challenges of growing tolerance to current chemical and disinfectant-based antibiofilm strategies have driven the urgency in finding a less vulnerable to bacterial resistance, effective alternative antibiofilm agent. To address these issues, various novel strategies are suggested in current days to combat bacterial biofilm. Among the innovative approaches, phytochemicals have already demonstrated their excellent performance in preventing biofilm formation and bactericidal actions against resident bacteria within biofilms. However, the diverse group of phytochemicals and their different modes of action become a barrier to applying them against specific pathogenic biofilm-formers. This phenomenon mandates the need to elucidate the multi-mechanistic actions of phytochemicals to design an effective novel antibiofilm strategy. Therefore, this review critically illustrates the structure − activity relationship, functional sites of actions, and target molecules of diverse phytochemicals regarding multiple major antibiofilm mechanisms and reversal mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance. The implementation of the in-depth knowledge will hopefully aid future studies for developing phytochemical-based next-generation antimicrobials.

Keywords:

• Biofilm
• phytochemical
• antibiotic resistance
• synergism
• food industry

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

Author’s Contribution

A.G.M.Sofi Uddin Mahamud: literature search, original draft writing, visualization, conceptualization; Shamsun Nahar: draft writing and editing, visualization, reviewing; Md. Ashrafudoulla: reviewing and editing; Si Hong Park: reviewing and editing; Sang-Do Ha: reviewing, investigation, supervision.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (2020R1F1A1067519) and the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety in 2022 (21153MFDS605).