The development of microbiological methods for phytochemical screening

The methods of antimicrobial screening which are applied to natural products are based upon conventional antibiotic susceptibility testing procedures. These tests were established about seventy years ago and can be time consuming,labour intensive and relatively costly in materials. Modern methods of compound isolation and purification, such as preparative HPLC, allow the production of large numbers of compounds in a relatively short time. For this reason, automated screening systems have been developed from the original methods, providing enormous capacity but at a cost which is too high for many phytochemistry laboratories. To be useful for screening compounds obtained from plant extracts, a test must be flexible in use and must be able to screen compounds quickly, easily, accurately and as cost effectively as possible. We have therefore concentrated on adapting the high-throughput methods for use in standard phytochemistry laboratories.