Using genomics to identify new targets and counteract resistance to antibiotics

Abstract

Despite the availability of powerful ‘omic’ tools, the slowing rate of discovery of new antibacterials, together with the rising problem of microbial resistance, does not guarantee that we will not revert to the pre-antibiotic era, as nowadays virtually every pathogen has been found to resist every antibiotic in clinical use. The identification and study of new inhibitable targets or finding new ways to inhibit already known targets appear to be two possible research options to obtain new antibiotics. These options are not mutually exclusive and, given the wealth of new data provided by genome-wide analysis and its related techniques (proteomics and interactomics among them), there is a need to devote sufficient effort and funding into selecting new targets and to apply rational research and screening strategies to overcome the initial lack of success in the search for these clearly needed drugs.

Keywords::

• antibiotics
• bacteria
• bioinformatics
• genomics
• high-throughput screening
• interactomics
• proteomics
• resistance
• resistomics
• transcriptomics

Acknowledgements

We thank MJ Pucci for the data that illustrates Table 2.

Our research is funded by grants GEN2003-20234-C06-02 and BIO2005-02194 from Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, COMBACT (S-BIO-0260/2006) from Comunidad de Madrid and BIOSINCEL from Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.