Medicinal plants as source of antibacterial agents to counter Klebsiella pneumoniae

Article history: Received on: 12/11/2013 Revised on: 10/12/2013 Accepted on: 27/12/2013 Available online: 30/01/2014 Several antibiotics are in use to treat different diseases caused by human pathogenic microorganisms. It is being observed that the invented medicines are not much effective in treatment, as the infection causing microbes are becoming resistant and modifying themselves into multidrug resistant strains. To fight against these human pathogens there is a need of introduction of new antibiotics. The synthetic derivatives or synthetic antibiotics are effective but unsafe for use and the results are not satisfactory due the resistance building capacity of the microbes. At the same time, the side effects and adverse reactions caused by these multispectrum antibiotics are not ignorable. Due to these reasons plant derived compounds or phytomedicines having antimicrobial action are needed to be evaluated, introduced and implemented through clinical and biological trials. Here we present the information about some plants which are reported to be antimicrobial in nature and act against human pathogens. The efficacy of their antimicrobial action needs to be evaluated for their biological functions. To be concise, our review is limited to the plants showing antimicrobial efficacy against Klebsiella pnuemoniae. For the present work we have focused on essential oil yielding plants which are known to be more useful to fight against this pathogen. A total of 90 plants species are reviewed, among them 14 are essential oil yielding plants. The plants which are able to inhibit the growth of the K. pneumoniae are enlisted and their details of the study such as family it belongs, parts used, microbial strain number used in the study, extractant and the standard antibiotic used to compare the effect are tabulated in detail to have a complete analysis of the information from the recent work. The essential yielding plants are tabulated separately.