The pesky ability of bacteria to develop resistance towards carefully constructed antibiotics constantly pushes researchers to develop novel compounds to annihilate them. Identifying new active compounds from the myriad of possibilities is a task made easier by computer-assisted ‘virtual screening‘, and now researchers from Germany and Switzerland have upped the ante once again with an even better process.
Gisbert Schneider and co-workers have developed a two-step screening process which they use to find small molecular aminoglycoside mimetics to inhibit bacterial protein biosynthesis. They screened a compound database using the pseudoreceptor approach with ‘fuzzy pharmacophore’ representations – which allows ‘scaffold-hopping’ to different ligand structures with retention of bioactivity – to find alternative chemotypes with lower structural complexity and greater synthetic accessibility.
Read how they did it here – the article’s free to access
Scaffold-hopping from aminoglycosides to small synthetic inhibitors of bacterial protein biosynthesis using a pseudoreceptor model
Dorota A. Urbanek, Ewgenij Proschak, Yusuf Tanrikulu, Steffi Becker, Michael Karas and Gisbert Schneider
Med. Chem. Commun. , 2011
DOI: 10.1039/C0MD00207K
