Synergistic interactions of plant essential oils with antimicrobial agents: a new antimicrobial therapy

Abstract

The problem of drug resistance of food borne pathogens is becoming more and more serious. Although traditional antimicrobial agents have good therapeutic effects on a variety of food borne pathogens, more effective antimicrobial agents are still needed to combat the development of drug-resistant food borne pathogens. Plant-based natural essential oils (EOs) are widely used because of their remarkable antimicrobial activity. A potential strategy to address food borne pathogens drug resistance is to use a combination of EOs and antimicrobial agents. Because EOs have multi-target inhibitory effects on microorganisms, combining them with drugs can enhance the activity of the drugs and avoid the emergence of food borne pathogens drug resistance. This paper introduces the main factors affecting the antibacterial activity of EOs and describes methods for evaluating their synergistic antibacterial effects. The possible mechanisms of action of EOs and the synergistic inhibitory effects on pathogens of EOs in combination with antimicrobial agents is described. In summary, the combined use of EOs and existing antimicrobial agents is a promising potential new antibacterial therapy.

Keywords:

• Antimicrobial agents
• antimicrobial mechanism
• essential oils
• foodborne microorganism
• synergistic effect

Conflicts of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

The work described in this article was supported by National Key R&D Program of China (2018YFC1602300), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20171139), Key R&D Program of Jiangsu Province (BE2019362), Forestry Science and Technology Innovation and Extension Project of Jiangsu Province (No. LYKJ[2017]26), National First-class Discipline Program of Food Science and Technology (JUFSTR20180509), Science and Technology Project of Jiangsu Bureau of Quality and Technical Supervision (KJ175923 and KJ185646), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation Funded Project (2018M642165), and Science and Technology Plan of Suzhou City (SS2019016)