Mechanism of Action
Antimicrobial Activity
Last updated
Direct action against a microorganism: disrupting its membrane, or interfering with something it needs in order to survive or replicate. Many natural peptides work by punching holes in the microbial membrane, which is why they act broadly rather than against a single species. The activity is nearly always established first as a minimum inhibitory concentration in a dish.
Why it matters here
The laboratory number here is precise and the leap to a person is large. A concentration that reliably kills bacteria on a plate may be unreachable in tissue, or reachable only at levels that damage the host, and the rung is where that gap shows.
What it is not
Antimicrobial action is not immune modulation: one attacks the organism, the other alters the host response, and evidence for one is not evidence for the other. Antimicrobial and antibacterial are also aliases on our Antimicrobial & Antiviral category, so check whether the field holds a mechanism or a shelf.
Also called
- antimicrobial
- antibacterial
- antimicrobial peptide activity
Antimicrobial peptide activity names the natural class of host defence peptides. That is a family of molecules rather than a single mechanism, and its members kill by more than one route.
Compounds carrying this term
None on file yet. This term is in the controlled vocabulary but no compound record currently uses it — which is a statement about our coverage, not about the term.