Potential anti-mycobacterium tuberculosis activity of plant secondary metabolites: Insight with molecular docking interactions

Tuberculosis (TB) is a recurrent and progressive disease, with high mortality rates world-wide. The drug-resistance phenomenon of Mycobacterium tuberculosis is a major obstruction of alle-lopathy treatment. An adverse side effect of allelopathic treatment is that it causes serious health complications. The search for suitable alternatives of conventional regimens is needed, i.e., by con-sidering medicinal plant secondary metabolites to explore anti-TB drugs, targeting the action site of M. tuberculosis. Nowadays, plant-derived secondary metabolites are widely known for their beneficial uses, i.e., as antioxidants, antimicrobial agents, and in the treatment of a wide range of chronic human diseases (e.g., tuberculosis), and are known to “thwart” disease virulence. In this regard, in silico studies can reveal the inhibitory potential of plant-derived secondary metabolites against My-cobacterium at the very early stage of infection. Computational approaches based on different algo-rithms could play a significant role in screening plant metabolites against disease virulence of tuberculosis for drug designing.