Antimicrobial Activity of Lectins from Plants

There are at least three reasons for the need in finding out new alternative antimicrobial substances from natural sources. The first reason is that people nowadays concern about toxic of synthetic substances including daily contact chemicals or even drugs used in medical or healthcare purposes (Hafidh et al., 2009). Any synthetic drugs were avoided in order to keep physiological cleans as belief. Thus, natural substances were used increasingly instead as well as any substances used for antimicrobial purposes. The second reason is that new alternative drugs are human hope for better fighting with existed diseases and pathogens. They may replace currently used drugs in points of more efficiency, more abundant, lower side-effect or safer or even lower production cost. It is fact that most alive organisms should have some mechanisms or substances fight with all time contacting pathogens so that they can be survived in nature. Although a plenty of antibiotics were discovered after first time Fleming’s declaration, but they were still relatively low amounts compared with overall real natural antimicrobial substances. This mean the natural sources still flourish with novel antimicrobial substances waiting for discovered. Additional small aspect may be raised here. The natural substances are usually good leading compound sources for mostly synthetic drug from the long past due to their diversities are far from human imagination. New chemical structures are always found in natural resources as higher frequency than artificial deducing structures. The final reason is that the mechanism used to synthesize natural substances are available and they are usually can be imitated in small, medium, and even large scale production with present biotechnological knowledge which looks easier than newly designed plants.