Medicinal plants and probiotics both have very high potential in terms of their antimicrobial activity against antibiotic-resistant enteric pathogens. The probiotics being enteric microorganism do not have any parasitic effect on human beings. They have been an integral part of daily food for centuries. They have been shown to have health beneficiary properties. The probiotics retard the growth of the microorganisms, while essential oil kills them. Combining the effect of medicinal plant extract and probiotics may be a new approach due to their complementary antimicrobial effects and practically no side effects. The synergistic effect of the essential oil and probiotics will be necessarily higher than using them alone as health product.

Recently, silver nanoparticles have generated enough interest due to their immense usage. Until now chemical synthesis has been a fast method to produce nanoparticles, but the release of environmental pollutants has raised caution. So a more subtle biochemical approach is in research. Three microorganisms, Aspergillus flavus, Phoma exigua and Bacillus megaterium, were selected to reduce silver nitrate to silver nanoparticles in aqueous form. All three microorganisms showed varying reducing capacity, of which Phoma exigua showed the highest, when their biomass was incubated in silver nitrate for 48 hours. The nanoparticles showed all the optical and physical properties, which were analyzed by measuring the surface plasmon resonance and TEM. It was also observed that the fungal species have varied growth in silver nitrate and can be used to produce silver nanoparticles, directly incubating the inocula of fungus in the media containing silver nitrate. On comparing all the characteristics and results produced, Aspergillus flavus was found to be the most effective microorganism, which can convert the silver nitrate to silver nanoparticles in aqueous condition. The bacterial species showed no growth with incubation with silver nitrate.

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