What is Rhamnolipid Biosurfactant?

Rhamnolipids are a class of biosurfactants which contain rhamnose as the sugar moiety linked to β-hydroxylated fatty acid chains. Rhamnolipids can be widely applied in many industries including petroleum, food, agriculture and bioremediation etc.

What is Lipopeptide Biosurfactant?

Lipopeptide biosurfactants are cyclic structures that consist of hydrophilic peptide sequences, of usually 7 to 10 amino acids long, while their hydrophobic moiety comprises a C13–C18 fatty acid chain. They are mainly produced by Bacillus or Pseudomonas species (Beltran-Gracia et al., 2017; Ndlovu et al., 2017).

Is Surfactin an antibiotic?

43.3. Surfactin: Surfactin has gained its name because of its surfactant properties produced by B. subtilis. It is a cyclic lipopeptide antibiotic reported to have antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral, anti-mycoplasma, and hemolytic activity (Baruzzi et al., 2011).

What is an example of a biofilm?

Plaque that forms on teeth is an example of a biofilm. Most bacteria are capable of forming biofilms. However, certain species have more of a disposition toward biofilms than others. In addition to plaque-forming bacteria on teeth, streptococci staphylococci, and lactobacilli also frequently form biofilms.

What is Iturin A?

Iturin A is a lipopeptide antibiotic with strong antifungal activity produced by Bacillus subtilis and Bacillus amyloliquefaciens. From: Handbook of Natural Antimicrobials for Food Safety and Quality, 2015.

How do Lipopeptides work?

Lipopeptides exert their effect by binding and disrupting the cell membrane integrity of the target bacteria and initiating a series of events that eventually leads to cell death.

What is surfactin active against?

It exhibits antimicrobial activity only against Gram-positive bacteria, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) (Ren et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2018). Other strains of B. subtilis were reported to produces lipopeptides mostly pertaining to surfactins, iturins, and fengycins (Zhang and Sun, 2018).

Is surfactin a protein?

The peptide moiety of the surfactin is synthesized using huge multienzymatic proteins called NonRibosomal Peptide Synthetases. This mechanism is responsible for the peptide biodiversity of the members of the surfactin family.

How do you detect biofilm?

There are various methods to detect biofilm production like Tissue Culture Plate (TCP), Tube method (TM), Congo Red Agar method (CRA), bioluminescent assay, piezoelectric sensors, and fluorescent microscopic examination.

Is pyocyanin a fluorescence?

Examples are the fluorescent pigment formed by some Pseudomonas spp., the blue–green pigment, pyocyanin, of Ps aeroginosa that diffuses into the agar and the non-diffusable, brown pigment produced by some strains of Bacillus subtilis, which is confined to the colonies.

What is the cytotoxicity of rhamnolipids?

Rhamnolipids exhibit cytotoxicity against leukemic, cervical, breast and bladder cancer cells, disrupt the biofilm formation in dairy, eliminate the oxidative stress by activating antioxidant enzymes (SOD, CAT and GR), and fold the outer membrane protein OmpA.

What is the role of rhamnolipids in food safety?

Rhamnolipids can be used as an alternative to stop the contamination of food because of their antimicrobial property towards the wide spectrum of microbes as shown in Table 2[13, 45, 77–79]. Table 2 List of microorganisms against which RLs show antimicrobial activity

Can rhamnolipids be used as therapeutic antitumor agents?

A study done by Lotfabad et al., reported that rhamnolipid-type biosurfactant (MR01 biosurfactant) synthesized from PAMR01 inhibited the growth of HeLa cancer cells at 5 µg/mL because of their cytotoxic activities [44]. Based on all these studies, we can conclude that rhamnolipids could be used as potential therapeutic antitumor agents.

What is the role of rhamnolipids in the fight against biofilm?

Rhamnolipids act as antibiofilm and antiadhesive agents to destruct the formation of biofilm by disturbing the solidarity of the cell membranes through their insertion into the lipid bilayer. Thus, rhamnolipids can be used farther as biofilm controlling strategies to prevent the decay of food.