Background:
Medicinal plants have been used to treat diseases for centuries. They are important sources in terms of their pharmacological effects and also have many microbial agents. Recently, the development of drug resistance has begun to spread in human pathogens against used antibiotic and this situation has led to the increasingly necessitating the new researches for novel antimicrobial substances from natural products containing plants.
Objective:
The purpose of this review is to determine the antimicrobial activity of pure phenolic compounds isolated from medicinal plants and to evaluate how molecular structures of these compounds affect the activity and also provide to the readers a source for future studies about natural antimicrobial agents.
Methods:
Relevant informations were gathered from scientific databases (Web of Science, Scifinder, Google Scholar, Science Direct, Wiley Online Library, PubMed, Taylor&Francis online) with using different keywords. Antimicrobial activity researches were selected especially on pure phenolic compounds.
Results:
Numerous phenolic compounds have been isolated from plants/plant extracts and these compounds are shown to prevent the growth of bacteria and fungi and their Minimum Inhibition Concentration and inhibition zone values were given in details.
Conclusion:
This review revealed that they have different antimicrobial activity according to the changes in molecular structure of phenolic compounds found in medicinal plants.
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