ANTIBIOTICS CHALLENGES MECHANISMS OPPORTUNITIES

• Main Authors: Walsh, Christopher (Author), Wencewicz, Timothy A (Author)
• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, DC ASM Press 2016
• Subjects: Anti-Bacterial Agents; Drug Resistance, Bacterial
• Online Access: Click Here to View Status and Holdings.

 Antibiotics: Challenges, Mechanisms, Opportunities details the contemporary challenges for discovery, optimization, and advancement of new antibiotics. It focuses on discovery not preclinical or clinical development. Given that the few classes of clinically significant antibiotics are all small molecules, this book focuses on the molecular structures and characteristics of both natural and synthetic antibacterial agents. Antibiotics is a valuable reference for microbiologists, bacterial physiologists, geneticists, pharmacologists, and drug developers. A chemocentric view of the molecular structures of antibiotics, their origins, actions, and major categories of resistance Antibiotics: Challenges, Mechanisms, Opportunities focuses on antibiotics as small organic molecules, from both natural and synthetic sources. Understanding the chemical scaffold and functional group structures of the major classes of clinically useful antibiotics is critical to understanding how antibiotics interact selectively with bacterial targets. This textbook details how classes of antibiotics interact with five known robust bacterial targets: cell wall assembly and maintenance, membrane integrity, protein synthesis, DNA and RNA information transfer, and the folate pathway to deoxythymidylate. It also addresses the universe of bacterial resistance, from the concept of the resistome to the three major mechanisms of resistance: antibiotic destruction, antibiotic active efflux, and alteration of antibiotic targets. Antibiotics also covers the biosynthetic machinery for the major classes of natural product antibiotics