Partial Antibiotic Spectrum Of Tomatin, an Antibiotic Agent from the Tomato Plant.

The clinical attractiveness of antibiotic agents, as typified by penicillin and streptomycin, lies in their ability to effect striking and specific bacteriostatic action in vivo without the simultaneous production of severe toxic symptoms. However, since penicillin and streptomycin are limited in their usefulness because of their ineffectiveness against certain important groups of pathogenic organisms, the search for new antibiotic agents continues in the hope that additional substances having sufficiently low toxicity will be found whose high antibiotic activity against the penicillinand streptomycin-resistant organisms will permit their therapeutic use in the conquest of the diseases caused by these pathogens. Although the fungi, including Actinomyces and related forms, and bacteria have been the most fruitful sources of antibiotic agents, antibiotic activity has also been attributed to the juices of certain green plants. Many plant families have been examined for antibiotic activity (Osborn, 1943; Huddleson et al., 1944; Lucas and Lewis, 1944; Seegal and Holden, 1945), and several plant constituents that possess antibiotic activity have been isolated in crystalline form. Among these antibiotic agents are a substance from garlic (Allium sativum) that has been tentatively identified as the sulfoxide of diallyl disulfide (Cavallito, Buck, and Suter, 1945); a substance from common burdock (Arctium minus) that has not been identified but which appears to be a lactone having the empirical formula C15H2006 (Cavallito, Bailey, and Kirchner, 1945); and a substance designated "crepin" from Crepis taraxacifolia that has the empirical formula C14H1604 (Heatley, 1944). It is the purpose of this paper to describe some of the antibiotic properties of what is believed to be a new antibiotic agent from a plant source. This substance occurs in the tomato plant and has been designated "tomatin." Tomatin has not yet been crystallized, but preparations of sufficient potency have been obtained to warrant a preliminary investigation of its antibiotic spectrum. Because of the probable impurity of the tomatin preparation used in the present investigation, the data to be presented have only qualitative or, at best, semi-