Coumarin Backbone as a Door-Opening Key for Investigating Chloroxylenol as Oral Antimicrobial Agents: an In Vitro–In Silico Study

Objective: Formulations containing chloroxylenol (COL), particularly Dettol, are commonly used in homes and hospitals for its antiseptic activity. Many studies documented the toxicity of this COL when human accidentally intake it in concentration less than 5%. Methods: The aim of this work is to use COL as a building block to create seven coumarin-based chemicals. Their structural frameworks were confirmed by various spectrophotometric methods. Also, these chemicals were submitted into two kinds of studies: in vitro and in silico. For the former one, the antimicrobial activity of these chemicals was specified against ten strains of infectious aerobes, anaerobes, and fungi. To explore the biocompatibility, the exploratory chemicals were studied using two normal bacteria and three healthy cellular lines. The in silico study include checking the theoretical capacity of the exploratory chemicals to oral-administrated and their toxicity-anticipated profiles. Results and Discussion: The gathered findings indicated that these chemicals has outstanding potential to inhibit the growth of infectious aerobes and fungi, and (AA4) being the best of their growth-inhibitor. Also, the same potential was observed against the infectious anaerobes, but here (AA1) was the superior growth-inhibitor. These wide-spectrum antimicrobial activities were coupled with great biocompatibilities with normal species under study. On the other hand, the results gathered from in silico study demonstrated that the exploratory chemicals have a powerful potential to oral-administrated with minimal anticipated toxicity. Conclusions: From these findings, the authors concluded that it is possible to use COL as a building unit to create biocompatible, wide-spectrum, low toxicity, oral-administrated antimicrobial prospects.