Green tea’s anti-bacterial properties
Green tea, in addition it’s antioxidant properties, also inhibits some types of bacteria:
“A cup of green tea contains up to 200mg of catechins, whose biological activity has been mainly attributed to its antioxidant activity.
In Asian cultures especially, the efficiency of green tea extract in oral hygiene has also been known for centuries, and gave the researchers a clue on how to study it.
Now scientists from the National Institute of Chemistry in Ljubljana, Slovenia discovered that the main ingredients of green tea bring lots of benefits.
They found out that green tea catechins inhibit the essential bacterial enzyme DNA gyrase, which is the target of several existing clinically used drugs.
Pinpointing the most abundant catechin
By the use of NMR spectroscopy, researchers from Slovenia have now pinpointed the ATP-binding site of DNA gyrase as target of EGCG, the most abundant catechin from the green tea extract.
Up to now several compounds targeted against the ATP-binding site of bacteria gyrase have been known but couldn’t be used as drugs due to their side effects on mammalian cells.
Lead researcher Roman Jerala, the head of the Laboratory of Biotechnology at NIC, explained: “We can anticipate to avoid the problem of toxicity using the compounds based on the green tea catechins, which have centuries of established safety record in the human diet.”
This finding may be used to develop even more potent antibacterial compounds.”
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