Natural Products for Antibacterial Infections in Current Scenario

Bacterial infections have always been a rising life threat from global health perspective. The need for novel antibacterial pharmacotherapeutic candidates is also mounting high with the increasing cases of resistance to frontline antibiotics, often leading to disease resurgence. In the last 10 years, extensive research has been diverted towards medicinal plants, viewing them as potential sources for novel antibacterial drug candidates because of their large functional and structural diversity. The bioactive compounds have a broad spectrum of pharmacological activities ranging from antimicrobial, anticancer, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antidiabetic, and immunomodulatory. Moreover, the phytoconstituents have a wider therapeutic window and less toxicity profile. More importantly, several phytoconstituents have been reported to disrupt the quorum-sensing and biofilm-forming capacity of bacteria, thereby emerging as novel and potent therapeutic alternatives for combating antibiotic resistance. The current chapter delves into the present developments in medicinal plant research, which are explored as potential sources of novel antibacterial agents. The chapter emphasizes on different natural compounds and their antibacterial mechanisms. It focuses the state-of-art computational and genomic approaches applied in the drug discovery pipeline of novel antibacterial candidates based on natural products.