Work

Antibiotics for Emerging Pathogens

Year: 2009

Type: review

Abstract: Antibiotic-resistant strains of pathogenic bacteria are increasingly prevalent in hospitals and the community. New antibiotics are needed to combat these bacterial pathogens, but progress in developing them has been slow. Historically, most antibiotics have come from a small set of molecular scaffolds whose functional lifetimes have been extended by generations of synthetic tailoring. The emergence of multidrug resistance among the latest generation of pathogens suggests that the discovery of new scaffolds should be a priority. Promising approaches to scaffold discovery are emerging; they include mining underexplored microbial niches for natural products, designing screens that avoid rediscovering old scaffolds, and repurposing libraries of synthetic molecules for use as antibiotics.

Source: Science

DOI: 10.1126/science.1176667

Authors: Michael A. Fischbach, Christopher T. Walsh

Institutions: Massachusetts General Hospital, Center for Computational and Integrative Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University

Language: English

Topic: Microbial Natural Products and Biosynthesis

Subfield: Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology

Field: Immunology and Microbiology

Domain: Life Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases