Naturally occurring compounds, or natural products, have been and continue to be an important source of commercially successful products and leads in the pharmaceutical, agrochemical and nutritional s
A chemocentric view of the molecular structures of antibiotics, their origins, actions, and major categories of resistanceAntibiotics: 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 machiner
