The plant essential oil bacterial targets: A review

In view of re-emerged drug resistance conferred by bacteria of medical importance towards the conventional antibiotics, it is high time to switch over the alternate medicaments specifically of plant origin. Medicinal and aromatic plants are a sub cluster of medicinal plants are rich source of phytoconstituents, synthesized through secondary metabolite pathways, are found in constituted form in essential oils. In the process of drug designing, the active principles annotated with antibacterial activity are to be detected using various analytical tools, followed by antibacterial assays. This review work has highlighted the current scenario on putative antibacterial drug targets of essential oils, namely flagella, cell wall synthesizing proteins/enzymes, DNA associated enzymes, ribosome assembly enzymes, bacterial cell division proteins, which may be deciphered by various instrumentals like Scanning Electron microscopy, Fluoroscent microscopy and more so FACS is used to enumeration to reach a concrete goal.