Schneider Yannik K
Marbio, Faculty for Fisheries, Biosciences and Economy, UiT-The Arctic University of Norway, Breivika, N-9037 Tromsø, Norway.
Antibiotics (Basel). 2021 Jul 10;10(7):842. doi: 10.3390/antibiotics10070842.
The problem of antibiotic resistance has become a challenge for our public health and society; it has allowed infectious diseases to re-emerge as a risk to human health. New antibiotics that are introduced to the market face the rise of resistant pathogens after a certain period of use. The relatively fast development of resistance against some antibiotics seems to be closely linked to their microbial origin and function in nature. Antibiotics in clinical use are merely products of microorganisms or derivatives of microbial products. The evolution of these antimicrobial compounds has progressed with the evolution of the respective resistance mechanisms in microbes for billions of years. Thus, antimicrobial resistance genes are present within the environment and can be taken up by pathogens through horizontal gene transfer. Natural products from bacteria are an important source of leads for drug development, and microbial natural products have contributed the most antibiotics in current clinical use. Bioprospecting for new antibiotics is a labor-intensive task as obstacles such as redetection of known compounds and low compound yields consume significant resources. The number of bacterial isolates one can theoretically investigate for new secondary metabolites is, on the other hand, immense. Therefore, the available capacity for biodiscovery should be focused on the most promising sources for chemical novelty and bioactivity, employing the appropriate scientific tools. This can be done by first looking into under- or unexplored environments for bacterial isolates and by focusing on the promising candidates to reduce the number of subjects.
抗生素耐药性问题已成为我们公共卫生和社会面临的一项挑战；它使得传染病再次成为对人类健康的一大威胁。投放市场的新型抗生素在使用一段时间后会面临耐药病原体的增多。某些抗生素耐药性的相对快速发展似乎与其微生物来源及在自然界中的功能密切相关。临床使用的抗生素仅仅是微生物的产物或微生物产物的衍生物。数十亿年来，这些抗菌化合物的进化与微生物中相应耐药机制的进化同步进行。因此，抗菌耐药基因存在于环境中，并可通过水平基因转移被病原体获取。细菌产生的天然产物是药物研发先导化合物的重要来源，微生物天然产物为当前临床使用的抗生素贡献最大。寻找新抗生素的生物勘探工作是一项劳动密集型任务，因为诸如重新发现已知化合物和化合物产量低等障碍会消耗大量资源。另一方面，理论上可用于研究新次级代谢产物的细菌分离株数量巨大。因此，生物发现的可用能力应集中于最具化学新颖性和生物活性的来源，并运用适当的科学工具。这可以通过首先在未充分研究或未探索的环境中寻找细菌分离株，并专注于有前景的候选对象以减少研究对象数量来实现。
