When the story came across my desk, it sounded too sweet to be true: our iconic Canadian elixir can actually help antibiotics vanquish resistant bacteria. Researchers at McGill University in Montreal have found that some of the chemicals in maple syrup — a phenolic fraction — can help antibiotics in two ways: by breaking down biofilms that many bacteria build to protect themselves and by stopping the action of “pumps” inside bacteria that flush antibiotics out of the bacteria. The maple syrup extract also affects the genes that make bacteria infective.

But this type of ability is not that unusual in plants. I have had the pleasure of working with a researcher in Mexico, Dr. Francisco Espinosa García, as well as students in his lab, who study “chemical ecology” – the chemicals produced by plants and animals that affect their interactions. For example, one of his students had an interesting paper on how tomatoes adapt genetically to produce a chemical that repels the tomato’s most common pest. Plants have complex chemical “immune systems” that fight off pests and infections. It is no wonder that these chemicals are often antibacterial.

Back 10 years ago, the Canadian Journal of Microbiology published a very interesting article from researchers in Brazil, where a methanolic pomegranate extract has been used as a folk remedy for infections. The researchers found that the extract worked synergistically with various antibiotics against many strains of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), one of the most feared infections today. There were some problems with the research – the antibiotics tested were older drugs no longer available in many industrialized countries and the tests were in a lab, not in people – but the principle was there.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the answer to antibiotic resistance may not involve going to the ends of the earth, but looking at the natural processes all around us to discover ways to combat pathogens with pomegranates, tomatoes and maple syrup.