A chemocentric view of the molecular structures of antibiotics, their
origins, actions, and major categories of resistance
Antibiotics: 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 machinery for the major
classes of natural product antibiotics.
Authors Christopher Walsh and Timothy Wencewicz provide compelling
answers to these questions:
- What are antibiotics?
- Where do antibiotics come from?
- How do antibiotics work?
- Why do antibiotics stop working?
- How should our limited inventory of effective antibiotics be
addressed?
Antibiotics is a textbook for graduate courses in chemical biology,
pharmacology, medicinal chemistry, and microbiology and biochemistry
courses. It is also a valuable reference for microbiologists, biological
and natural product chemists, pharmacologists, and research and
development scientists.
