Coalition of Biology and Chemistry for Ameliorating Antimicrobial Drug Discovery

Natural products (NPs) are superior starting point for the major antimicrobials used in clinical trials (Newman and Cragg, 2012; Butler et al., 2014). Such antimicrobial NPs can be obtained from different microorganisms (Polpass and Jebakumar, 2013) and plants (Atanasov et al., 2015). They can be broadly classified as (i) native NPs, (ii) derivatives of NPs, or (iii) synthetic products based on structures of NPs (Demain and Sanchez, 2009). While NPs exhibit a wide range of pharmacophores and a high degree of stereochemistry (Harvey et al., 2015), novel NPs with better activities still need to be developed. Versatile biological knowledge based synthetic-biology approaches, system-biology guided metabolic engineering techniques, enzymatic modifications, and synthetic chemistry methods can be utilized to maximize the benefit of NPs from the source organism (Dhakal et al., 2015, 2016). Thus, the optimum application of NPs can only be improved with considerable effort based on precise screening, higher production, and desirable structural diversification (Dhakal and Sohng, 2015).