Designing novel antibacterials: application of omics science

Abstract

Antibacterials are agents that act against pernicious bacterial pathogens by killing or inactivating them. At present, designing antibacterials have been assisted greatly by omics sciences-genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and interactomics. This review discusses different aspects of the omics sciences in simple to complex hierarchies. From the simplest of sequence analysis to more complex on the pyramid -structural, functional and interactional analysisall comprises the grand ambit of omics science. Sequence comparison can reveal novel information about drug resistance in the bacteria and thus can be of momentous significance for designing improved antibacterials. On the other hand, sequence characterization of the host protein can lead to production of effective antibiotic synthetically. Nowadays, structure based molecular designing, using computational docking techniques, has become a widely accepted routine work in drug designing processes. Moreover, new high-throughput data from microarray expression, protein-protein interaction assay are opening up a new vista for detecting more and more drug targets. Extensive focus put on to understand host-pathogen interaction on systems level has greatly accelerated the process of designing effective antibacterials against tuberculosis and many such complex diseases. Summarizing, this review exemplifies various different ways how increasingly omics science is transforming the paradigm of discovering novel antibacterials; omics approach is all set to speed up the process and bring down the expenses of the antibacterials even more in time to come.