Foodborne bacterial pathogens in consumed foods are major food safety concerns worldwide, leading to serious illness and even death. An exciting strategy is to use novel phenolic compounds against bacterial pathogens based on recruiting the inducible metabolic responses of plant endogenous protective defense against biotic and abiotic stresses. Such stress-inducible phenolic metabolites have high potential to reduce bacterial contamination, and particularly improve safety of plant foods. The stimulation of plant protective response by inducing biosynthesis of stress-inducible phenolics with antimicrobial properties is among the safe and effective strategies that can be targeted for plant food safety and human gut health benefits. Metabolically driven elicitation with physical, chemical, and microbial elicitors has shown significant improvement in the biosynthesis of phenolic metabolites with antimicrobial properties in food and medicinal plants. Using the above rationale, this review focuses on current advances and relevance of metabolically driven elicitation strategies to enhance antimicrobial phenolics in plant food models for bacterial-linked food safety applications. Additionally, the specific objective of this review is to explore the potential role of redox-linked pentose phosphate pathway (PPP) regulation for enhancing biosynthesis of stress-inducible antibacterial phenolics in elicited plants, which are relevant for wider food safety and human health benefits.
Keywords: antimicrobials; elicitation; foodborne pathogens; pentose phosphate pathway; plant phenolics.