Exploiting genomics to discover new antibiotics

There is an urgent need to develop new classes of antibiotics to tackle the increase in resistance in many common bacterial pathogens. One strategy to develop new antibiotics is to identify and exploit new molecular targets and this strategy is being driven by the wealth of new genome sequence information now available. Additionally, new technologies have been developed to validate new antibacterial targets, for example, new technologies have been developed to enable rapid determination of whether a gene is essential and to assess the transcription status of a putative target during infection. As a result, many novel validated targets have now been identified and for some, appropriate high-throughput screens against diverse compound collections have been carried out. Novel antibiotic leads are emerging from these genomics-derived targeted screens and the challenge now is to optimize and develop these leads to become part of the next generation of antibiotics.