Problems of Determining the Medicinal Herbal Remedies Antimicrobial Activity and Their Solution Methods

Intriduction. Currently, the antibiotic resistance development in pathogenic microorganisms remains a global problem. To solve this problem, an active search and development of new antimicrobial drugs, including those of plant origin, is underway. In the many years course of experience in this area, methods used to determine antimicrobial activity are being developed and improved, however, not all of them are suitable for determining the activity of biologically active substances of plant origin. The purpose of the study. To summarize information about existing methods for determining antimicrobial activity under in vitro experimental conditions. Material and methods. The article is based on publication materials from the PubMed and E-library databases, search.rsl. The literary search was carried out by keywords: antimicrobial activity, antibacterial effect, antibiotic, herbal preparations. The review includes articles that are relevant to the research topic and have been published over the past 10 years. Results and discussion. The article describes the main methods for determining antimicrobial activity in vitro and determines the possibility of using these methods in relation to herbal remedies. Conclusions. The findings indicated that the choice of the research method should depend primarily on the object under study and the type of microorganism in respect of which the activity is determined. Most of the developed and widely used methods for determining antimicrobial activity do not allow an adequate assessment of the activity of herbal remedies. Thus, when working with herbal remedies, the methods of double serial dilutions in liquid nutrient media with the use of indicators and the developing direction of activity research on biofilms can be considered the most accurate.