Novel Targets for Antimicrobials

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is the phenomenon developed by microorganism on exposure to antimicrobial agents, making them unresponsive. Development of microbial confrontation is a severe rising risk to global community well-being as treatment in addition, 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 novel targets such as biomolecules involving in biosynthesis of cell wall, biosynthesis of aromatic amino acid, cell disunion, biosynthesis of fatty acid, and isoprenoid biosynthesis and tRNA synthetases. Fatty acid biosynthesis (FAB) and their enzymes among all the above is the more appealing target for the advancement of new antimicrobial agents. Number of promising inhibitors have been developed for bacterial fatty acid synthesis (FAS) 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 FAB in type II FAS system and potential inhibitors with respective targets of novel antibacterial.