A Novel Antimicrobial Peptide from Crotalaria pallida Seeds with Activity Against Human and Phytopathogens

Abstract

An actual severe problem in agriculture consists of an expressive increase of economical losses caused by fungi and resistant bacteria toward antibiotics. In order to find a solution to this problem, several studies have been concentrating on the screening of novel plant defense peptides with antimicrobial activities. These peptides are commonly characterized by having low molecular masses and cationic charges. The present work reports the purification and characterization of a novel plant peptide with molecular mass of 5340 Da, named Cp-AMP, from seeds of C. pallida, a typical plant from Caatinga biome. Purification was achieved using a size exclusion S-200 column followed by reversed-phase chromatography on Vydac C18-TP column. In vitro assays indicated that Cp-AMP was able to inhibit the development of filamentous fungi Fusarium oxysporum as well as the gram-negative bacterium Proteus sp. The identification of Cp-AMP could contribute, in the near future, to the development of biotechnological products, such as transgenic plants with enhanced resistance to pathogenic fungi and/or of antibiotics production derived from plant sources in order to control bacterial infections.

Alternative Use of Extracts of Chipilín Leaves (Crotalaria longirostrata Hook. & Arn) as Antimicrobial

“…In the last two decades, there has been growing interest in research for extracts for medicinal plants as sources of new antimicrobial agents [12][13][14]. Recent findings about species of the genus Crotalaria describe their biological activity, by example the ethanolic fractions of C. retusa, the chloroform fraction of C. prostrate, the ethanolic extract of C. medicaginea, the ethanolic extract of C. pallida, the methanolic extract of C. burhia, and the fractions of C. bernieri and C. madurensis showed inhibitory capacity against E. coli [4,9,10,13,21].…”

“…We evaluated its antimicrobial potential, finding that the fraction of dichloromethane is more effective in inhibiting the growth of FoT (61.7%) in comparison with the aqueous extract of C. medicagenina (33%) and the methanolic extract of C. filipes (55%). However, it was less efficient than the isolated peptide of C. pallida (70%) [1,12,22]. Further, the aqueous fraction showed low inhibition values (2.5%) against F. solani, while the 2-propanone fraction (35%) revealed activity for the aqueous extract of C. juncea [23].…”

“…A volume of 0.1 mL of inoculated cell suspension broth was placed on each Petri dish (Ec 2.95 × 10 3 CFU/mL; Cf 8.47 × 10 3 CFU/mL and 2.86 × 10 6 CFU/mL for Se) [12]. Then, four Whatman No.…”

“…[12][13][14]. The species of this genus contain alkaloids, saponins, and flavonoids to which biological activity is attributed [4].…”

The conservation of native, lowland Indonesian Begonia species (Begoniaceae) in Bogor Botanic Gardens

“…Related to MIC and MBC several medicinal plants of India (Patil et al 2012), Korea (Kim et al 2008b), and Indonesia (Batubara et al 2009) were reported to have MIC and MBC potential against P. acnes. The inhibition of leaf extract from C. pallida may cause by some compounds contained in this plant such as pyrrolizidine alkaloids (Martins et al 2015), peptides (Pelegrini et al 2009), flavonoids (Ko et al 2004) or others compound. The V. pinnata extracts inhibited P. acnes can be affected by iridoids, flavonoids, ecdysteroids, pinnata sterones or others compound (Ata et al 2009;Meena et al 2010).…”