Antibacterial drug discovery in the post-genomics era

Antibacterial research has evolved dramatically over the past five decades. Early work relied on serendipity of finding drug-like molecules, usually natural products that had desirable antibacterial and nontoxic properties without regard to mechanism of action. In the past decade, however, significant technological advances in the fields of genomics, molecular biology, high-throughput screening, and structural biochemistry have led to a fundamentally new paradigm in the pursuit of novel antibacterial agents. The new methods promise to lead to the discovery of novel drug-target pairs that will be useful in the continuing battle against drug-resistant bacterial infections. This review describes this new paradigm, the technologies on which it is based, and the current status of this approach in drug discovery.