Antimicrobial Properties of Medicinal Teas and Their Interactions with Antibiotics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria has greatly increased the need for new drugs to be developed. These drugs may be new antibiotics, or synergists of existing antibiotics. Plants have been identified as a valuable source of new drugs, as plants produce secondary metabolites that have antimicrobial and synergistic activity. In addition, plants are the basis of many natural health products and dietary supplements, and public interest in these products continues to increase. The increasing popularity of natural health products also increases the possibility for antagonistic interactions to occur when these products are used in conjunction with antibiotics. The present study investigated the antimicrobial properties of aqueous extracts of three medicinal teas and their interactions with common antibiotics. The antimicrobial properties of the aqueous extracts of Bronchitis tea, Eyebright tea, and Hyssop tea were assessed via disk diffusion. It was found that both Eyebright tea and Hyssop tea extracts have antimicrobial properties, likely due to the phenolic acids and flavonoids found in extracts of these plants. Interactions between the tea extracts and antibiotics were assessed using a double disk diffusion method, where it was found that all three tea extracts interact antagonistically with sulfadiazine. Additionally, Eyebright tea extract was found to interact antagonistically with chloramphenicol. While further research is required to determine the mechanism of this interaction and the specific compounds involved, this research has identified that these teas should potentially be used with caution in combination with antibiotics. In addition, the antimicrobial properties of both Hyssop and Eyebright tea extracts warrant further research as these extracts may be the basis for new antimicrobial drugs in the future. Presented in absentia on April 27, 2020 at Student Research Day at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta. (Conference cancelled). Also presented at the Undergraduate Research in Science Conference of Alberta (URSCA). Faculty mentor: Kimberley Harcombe Department: Biological Sciences NOTE: This work is available to MacEwan users only at https://roam.macewan.ca/islandora/object/gm:2131
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".