Abstract
The resistance to antimicrobials developed by several bacterial species has become one of the main health problems in recent decades. It has been widely reported that natural products are important sources of antimicrobial compounds. Considering that animal venoms are under-explored in this line of research, in this study, we screened the antibacterial activity of venoms of eight snake and five lepidopteran species from northeastern Argentina. Twofold serial dilutions of venoms were tested by the agar well-diffusion method and the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) determination against seven bacterial strains. We studied the comparative protein profile of the venoms showing antibacterial activity. Only the viperid and elapid venoms showed remarkable dose-dependent antibacterial activity towards most of the strains tested. Bothrops diporus venom showed the lowest MIC values against all the strains, and S. aureus ATCC 25923 was the most sensitive strain for all the active venoms. Micrurus baliocoryphus venom was unable to inhibit the growth of Enterococcus faecalis. Neither colubrid snake nor lepidopteran venoms exhibited activity on any bacterial strain tested. The snake venoms exhibiting antibacterial activity showed distinctive protein profiles by SDS–PAGE, highlighting that we could reveal for the first time the main protein families which may be thought to contribute to the antibacterial activity of M. baliocoryphus venom. This study paves the way to search for new antibacterial agents from Argentinian snake venoms, which may be a further opportunity to give an added value to the local biodiversity.
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The data sets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
This work was carried out in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the PhD degree of M.A. Gritti (recipient of a CONICET grant) at the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires (UBA) in Argentina. We would like to thank Y. Antonio for helping in editing Fig. 1. We are immensely grateful to all who have collaborated with the logistics to perform the microbiological experiments.
Funding
This work was supported by INMeT-ANLIS Malbrán, and AGENCIA I+D+i (PICT-2020-SERIEA-02027) from Argentina, and the Universidade Federal da Integração Latino-Americana (UNILA) from Brazil.
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Conceived and designed the analysis: MAG, MEP; collected the data: MAG; contributed data or analysis tools: FLT, GPT, KYG; performed the analysis: MAG, MEP; wrote the original draft of the manuscript: MAG, FLT, MEP; contributed to discussion and reviewed and edited the manuscript: MAG, FLT, GPT, KYG, MEP. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
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Gritti, M.A., González, K.Y., Tavares, F.L. et al. Exploring the antibacterial potential of venoms from Argentinian animals. Arch Microbiol 205, 121 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-023-03465-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-023-03465-4