Presenters: David Suisse
Authors: David Suisse, Kayla Suisse
Faculty Advisor: Amita Kaundal
Institution: Utah State University
Natural medicines with antimicrobial capabilities often contain secondary metabolites from any number of plants or fungi. These plant-derived compounds can have great medicinal or agricultural value. Artemisia tridentatais said to contain antimicrobial compounds and has been used as a medicinal herb in Native American cultural medicine. Artemisia annua, a Chineseherb, was used to derive artemisinin, a common antimalarial drug and potential anticancer treatment. Very few studies exist to research the identity of any antimicrobial compounds in A. tridentata. This study is to identify any antimicrobial compounds in A. tridentata. We collected, dried, and crushed local samples of three different parts of the plant—twigs, leaves, and flowers. We then created an oil extract using methanol and dissolved it in DMSO. We soaked paper disks in the extracts and tested antimicrobial activity by disk diffusion antimicrobial assay. We tested each oil extract against Agrobacterium tumefaciens, Pseudomonas syringaepv DC3000, P.syringaepv tabaci, Bacillus subtilis, and a cloning strain of E. coliDh5α.We found that the extract was effective at inhibiting growth of each bacteria, except E. coli. B. subtilisshowed the clearest results, with large zones of inhibition similar in size to those surrounding our gentamycin positive control disks. Upon positive results, we created and standardized our methodology for the following process. We separated the compounds within the extract via High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) and are testing each of the fractions individually against B. subtilis through disk diffusion. We then plan to identify the antimicrobial compound within the plant extract through Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (LCMS) analysis and comparison with the chemical library. The discovery of any actively antimicrobial compound, whether known or previously undiscovered, will be valuable due to the abundance and availability of A. tridentatain the western United States.