If lycopene appeared to act as a nutrient with no antibacterial properties, why would lower doses of the same molecule have an opposite result? At doses low enough for there to be no nutrient effect, wouldn’t any antibiotic effect also be neutralized?
Ya that’s actually something we thought about a lot! Interestingly enough there are compounds that exhibit higher antibacterial effects at lower doses so there is a possibility that Lycopene is one of those compounds. If we were able to conduct future studies it would be interesting to test Lycopene at even lower than 0.3125% to see if the antibacterial effect is heightened.
Hi Annie, great job! What prompted you to look into the leaf, rather than the flesh or seed (et cetera) of the papaya? Do you think it plays into why the results suggested it acting as a probiotic versus antibiotic?
Thats a great question thanks! We aren’t too sure what was contributing to the increased bacterial growth but thats definitely an interesting theory. We chose the leaf extract as that was what we were reading about having antibacterial effects in the literature we found. We actually were hoping to test the fruit too to see if it also had an effect but unfortunately we ran out of time. That’s a really great idea for future studies though!
That’s a really great question. In all of our research we haven’t found anything that suggests any of the compounds could be harmful to cells, but thats definitely something we could look into more!
We actually started testing another compound in the leaf extract called quercetin, but unfortunately we couldn’t test it because of solubility issues. Other than that I’m sure there’s many compounds in the leaf extract that we didn’t have time to test individually that would be good to test in future studies!
If lycopene appeared to act as a nutrient with no antibacterial properties, why would lower doses of the same molecule have an opposite result? At doses low enough for there to be no nutrient effect, wouldn’t any antibiotic effect also be neutralized?
Ya that’s actually something we thought about a lot! Interestingly enough there are compounds that exhibit higher antibacterial effects at lower doses so there is a possibility that Lycopene is one of those compounds. If we were able to conduct future studies it would be interesting to test Lycopene at even lower than 0.3125% to see if the antibacterial effect is heightened.
Hi Annie, great job! What prompted you to look into the leaf, rather than the flesh or seed (et cetera) of the papaya? Do you think it plays into why the results suggested it acting as a probiotic versus antibiotic?
Thats a great question thanks! We aren’t too sure what was contributing to the increased bacterial growth but thats definitely an interesting theory. We chose the leaf extract as that was what we were reading about having antibacterial effects in the literature we found. We actually were hoping to test the fruit too to see if it also had an effect but unfortunately we ran out of time. That’s a really great idea for future studies though!
Are there any compounds in the leaf extract that could indicate that it could be harmful to somatic cells?
That’s a really great question. In all of our research we haven’t found anything that suggests any of the compounds could be harmful to cells, but thats definitely something we could look into more!
Have you considered using other compounds found in the leaf?
We actually started testing another compound in the leaf extract called quercetin, but unfortunately we couldn’t test it because of solubility issues. Other than that I’m sure there’s many compounds in the leaf extract that we didn’t have time to test individually that would be good to test in future studies!