Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 13, Issue 24, 2013

Pleuromutilins were discovered as natural-product antibiotics in 1950. The modifications of pleuromutilin lead to the successful development of veterinary medicines such as tiamulin and valnemulin. Retapamulin became the first pleuromutilin approved for use in human skin infections. Recent advances have led to the synthesis of pleuromutilins that combine potent antibacterial activity with favorable pharmaceutical properties, and three new pleuromutilins, BC-3781, BC-3205 and BC-7013, have entered clinical trials. In this review, the key pleuromutilin derivatives, as well as related novel derivatives during 2009-2013, and its antibacterial activities, are presented. Moreover, the antibacterial and resistance mechanism are discussed.

Several classes of antimicrobial compounds are presently available; microorganism's resistance to these drugs constantly emerges. In order to prevent this serious medical problem, the elaboration of new types of antibacterial agents or the expansion of bioactivity of the naturally known biosensitive compounds is a very interesting research problem. The synthesis and characterization of metal complexes with organic bioactive ligands is one of the promising fields for the search. The biological activities of the metal complexes differ from those of either the ligand or the metal ion. The results obtained thus far have led to the conclusion that structural factors, which govern antimicrobial activities, are strongly dependent on the central metal ion. A review of papers dealing with the Ag(I) and Hg(II) complexes of N donor ligands is presented. These metal complexes of N-chelating ligands have attracted considerable attention because of their interesting physicochemical properties and pronounced biological activities. This review will mainly focus on the preparation procedures and antibacterial properties of free organic ligands and the corresponding complexes. Finally, a research about antimicrobial properties of new Hg(II) complexes with 5-methyl-5-(4-pyridyl)-2,4-imidazolidenedione (L) and various halogen ions, HgL2X2(X = Cl¯ (49), Br¯ (50), and I¯ (51)), is reported. Noteworthy antimicrobial activities, evaluated by minimum inhibitory concentration, for these complexes were observed.

The growing incidences of drug-resistant pathogens have increased the attention on several medicinal plants and their metabolites for antimicrobial properties. These pathogens are the main cause of nosocomial infections which led to an increasing mortality among hospitalized patients. Taking into consideration those factors, this paper reviews the state-of-the-art of the research on antibacterial agents from native Brazilian plant species related to nosocomial infections as well as the current methods used in the investigations of the antimicrobial activity and points out the differences in techniques employed by the authors. The antimicrobial assays most frequently used were broth microdilution, agar diffusion, agar dilution and bioautography. The broth microdilution method should be the method of choice for testing new antimicrobial agents from plant extracts or isolated compounds due to its advantages. At the moment, only a small part of the rich Brazilian flora has been investigated for antimicrobial activity, mostly with unfractionated extracts presenting a weak or moderate antibacterial activity. The combination of crude extract with conventional antibiotics represents a largely unexploited new form of chemotherapy with novel and multiple mechanisms of action that can overcome microbial resistance that needs to be further investigated. The antibacterial activity of essential oil vapours might also be an interesting alternative treatment of hospital environment due to their ability in preventing biofilm formation. However, in both alternatives more studies should be done on their mode of action and toxicological effects in order to optimize their use.

Efflux pumps of the Resistance Nodulation Division (RND) superfamily play a major role in the intrinsic and acquired resistance of Gram-negative pathogens to antibiotics. Moreover, they are largely responsible for multi-drug resistance (MDR) phenomena in these bacteria. The last decade has seen a sharp increase in the number of experimental and computational studies aimed at understanding their functional mechanisms. Most of these studies focused on the RND drug/proton antiporter AcrB, part of the AcrAB-TolC efflux pump actively recognizing and expelling noxious agents from the interior of bacteria. These studies have been focused on the dynamical interactions between AcrB and its substrates and inhibitors, on the details of the proton translocation mechanisms, and on the way AcrB assembles with protein partners to build up a functional pump. In this review we summarize these advances focusing on the role of AcrB.

Resistance of bacteria to current antibiotics has increased worldwide, being one of the leading unresolved situations in public health. Due to negligence regarding the treatment of community-acquired diseases, even healthcare facilities have been highly impacted by an emerging problem: nosocomial infections. Moreover, infectious diseases, including nosocomial infections, have been found to depend on multiple pathogenicity factors, confirming the need to discover of multi-target antibacterial agents. Drug discovery is a very complex, expensive, and time-consuming process. In this sense, Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships (QSAR) methods have become complementary tools for medicinal chemistry, permitting the efficient screening of potential drugs, and consequently, rationalizing the organic synthesis as well as the biological evaluation of compounds. In the consolidation of QSAR methods as important components of chemoinformatics, the use of mathematical chemistry, and more specifically, the use of graph-theoretical approaches has played a vital role. Here, we focus our attention on the evolution of QSAR methods, citing the most relevant works devoted to the development of promising graph-theoretical approaches in the last 8 years, and their applications to the prediction of antibacterial activities of chemicals against pathogens causing both community-acquired and nosocomial infections.

Imidazole, a five-membered heterocycle having three carbon atoms, and two double bonds, having efficient antibacterial Escherichia coli, Bacillus subtili, Bacillus proteus, Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Helicobacter pyloriurease etc, shows a broad-spectrum of antibacterial activities. To Search new antibacterial drugs to overcome resistance of microorganisms to antibiotics, to date hundreds of this sort of derivatives have been synthesized and possess potent antibacterial activity. As the structure of imidazole derivatives is various, the target of antibacterial is also diverse including β-Lactamases, β-ketoacyl-acyl carrier protein synthase III (FabH), DNA gyrase and topoisomerase, glutamate racemase and urease. In this review, we will discuss the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and attempt to summarize the main developments of imidazole derivatives in the past ten years. We hope that increasing knowledge of the structure-activity relationship (SAR) will be beneficial to the rational design of new generation of small molecule antibacterial drugs.

Enormous efforts were focused on the 3-descladinosyl erythromycin derivatives which led to 3-keto (ketolides), 3-O-acyl (acylides), 3-O-carbamate (carbamolides), and 3-O-alkyl (alkylides) and cladinosyl-containing erythromycin derivatives such as 4"-O-acyl, 4"-O-carbamate, and 4"-O-alkyl derivatives as recently exemplified by macrolones (macrolide-quinolone hybrids). Ketolides acquire activity against MLSB-resistant pathogens via a featured arylalkyl extension suspended on the macrolide core, which interacts with a base pair formed by A752Ec and U2609Ec located in the nascent peptide release tunnel of the bacterial rRNA. A base pair formed by C2610Ec and G2505Ec probably is another novel binding site for 3-descladinosyl non-ketolides. It is believed that 4"-derived compounds perhaps interfere with the formation of polypeptide because the extension oriented into peptidyl transferase center (PTC) region. Although macrolones are hybrids of macrolides and quinolones, they do not have dual modes of action, and serve only as protein synthesis inhibitors.

Evolution of bacteria resistant to the most diverse antibiotics is posing one of the major threats to public health. Particular alarm is raised by those genetic lines that develop phenotypes simultaneously resistant to multiple drugs. Among the different mechanisms leading to multidrug resistance, multidrug efflux pumps raise particular concern. These are large macromolecular constructs localised at cell boundaries, which are able to actively bind and transport out of the cell several chemically uncorrelated substrates. In this last decade, computer modelling has proved to be a valuable tool for the investigation of multiple drug-efflux systems at the molecular level. In particular, molecular dynamics simulations unveiled several aspects of the molecular mechanisms governing the recognition and transport of drugs by these systems. Computer-aided protocols constitute a bottom-up reductionist approach that has the privilege of obtaining clean data referring intrinsically to those single parts of the efflux process explicitly taken into account. Combining computational data to the experimental determinations may therefore help in the definition of possible general criteria limiting the action of these systems against both patented and new putative antibiotic agents. Here, we review the most relevant contributions by computational scientists to the understanding of multidrug-efflux systems in the recent past. Particular care is put in the description of the dynamical features of multidrug exporters, a valuable piece of information for which computer modelling represents one of the best investigation tools available at present.

Nowadays, the patient safety is seriously jeopardized by the emergence and spread of nosocomial pathogens in the form of biofilm that is resistant to traditional and affordable antimicrobials. Although advances in organic synthesis have extended the lifetime of classic antibiotics through synthetic modifications, the search of innovative antibiofilm compounds from natural sources can provide new templates, novel targets and unique mechanisms that should have advantages over known antimicrobial agents. Testing sub-lethal concentrations of crude extracts and/or isolated compounds from plants and microorganisms is critical to acting on mechanisms subtler than the killing activity, e.g. those influencing the multicellular behavior, offering an elegant way to develop novel antimicrobial-free antibiofilm strategies. Herein we discussed the search and biological activity of small molecules from natural sources and their synthetic derivatives able to modulate biofilm genesis of nosocomial pathogens through non-microbicidal mechanisms (sub-lethal concentrations). The present work offers an overview about the approaches applied to the discovery of lead small molecules including a) conventional drug design methods like screening of chemical compounds obtained from nature and b) computer- aided drug design approaches. Finally, a classification (not exhaustive but representative) based on the natural origin of small molecules and their synthetic derivatives was reported. The information presented in this review should be of interest to a broad range of disciplines and represents an effort to summarize experimental research and advances in this field.

Antimicrobial Peptides (AMPs) incorporating unnatural Amino Acids have several advantages over naturally occurring AMPs based on factors such as bioavailability, metabolic stability and overall toxicity. Here we discuss the broad spectrum and organism specific bioactivity of unnatural amino acids incorporating AMPs against gram positive organisms such as S. aureus, E. faecium etc, gram negative organisms such as S. typhimurium, K. pneumonia etc and mycobacterium organisms such as M. ranae. We present comparative bioactivities of these AMPs against ESKAPE organism and select agent organisms such as Y. pesti, B. anthracis etc. The denovo design philosophy involving the three spacers approach with Spacer-1 defining flexibility, Spacer-2 determining overall surface charge density and Spacer-3 defining the conformational flexibility is discussed. The novel approach of differential computation of logP, Solvent-Accessible- Surface-Area , and Molecular Volume employing tripeptides with Gly as reference vis-à-vis various natural and unnatural amino acids, gives access to the estimation of the three important properties in the designed AMPs. An overview of the interaction studies employing Circular Dichroism (CD), Isothermal Titration Calorimetry (ITC) and induced Calcein leakage studies with these AMPs and various cell membranes mimics is presented.