Novel Targets For Antimicrobials

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is the phenomenon developed by microorganism on exposure to antimicrobial agents, making them unresponsive. Development of microbial resistance is a severe rising threat to global public health as treatment and management of such resistant microbial infections is difficult and challenging. The situation requires action across all government sectors and society. The change in the molecular target on which antimicrobial drugs act is one of the key mechanisms behind AMR. One of the approaches to battle with AMR can be exploring newer molecular targets in microbes and discovering new molecules accordingly.
There are various examples of new targets like cell wall biosynthesis, aromatic amino acid biosynthesis, cell division, fatty acid biosynthesis, and isoprenoid biosynthesis and tRNA synthetases. Fatty acid biosynthesis and their enzymes among all the above is the more appealing target for the development of new antimicrobial agents. Numbers of promising inhibitors have been developed for bacterial fatty acid synthesis and also few of them are clinically used. Some of these potential inhibitors are found to be used in development of new antibacterial as a lead compound and have been discovered from high throughput screening processes like Platencimycin and their analogue, Platencin. The review majorly encompasses bacterial fatty acid biosynthesis in Type II FAS system and potential inhibitors with respective targets of novel antibacterial.