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ANTIMICROBIAL COMPOUNDS FROM COCOA TISSUES AGAINST HUMAN PATHOGENS

Project Leader : Zainal Baharum

BACKGROUND

Plants continue to play a major role in primary health care as therapeutic remedies in many developing countries, and plants still continue to be almost the exclusive source of drugs for the majority of the world’s population. Cocoa trees (Theobroma cacao L.) can be one of the potential plants that produce antimicrobial compounds against human pathogenic microorganisms. There are no known bacterial diseases of cocoa. No one knows why and no one has investigated antibacterial or antifungal compounds from cocoa trees, even though indigenous people in Central America used extracts from cocoa flowers to treat eye infections.

A technology will be developed to isolate antimicrobial compounds from cocoa tissues, assayed their activities against human pathogens and identify the compounds.