The Potential of Terminalia chebula Aqueous Extract in Plasmid Curing Activity against R-plasmids of Microorganisms

From ancient times, humans are benefited from traditional drugs based on medicinal plant formulations. They are known to have preventive and curing abilities for various ailments. Antimicrobial resistance occurs due to the mutation in microorganisms and the inappropriate use of antibiotics. The use of plasmid-curing agents in combination with antibiotics may serve as a solution to control the development and spread of antibiotic resistance encoded by antibiotic resistance plasmids. In this chapter, we describe the plasmid curing activity of the protein-enriched aqueous extract from the fruit of Terminalia chebula against multi-drug resistance bacteria Bacillus subtilis and Shigella sonnei. The partially purified extract cured plasmids pUB110 and pARI-815 of B. subtilis and S. sonnei at 100% and 44% curing efficiency, respectively, which was also checked by the agarose gel electrophoresis.