Special Issue "Antimicrobial Agents"

Guest Editor
Dr. Dooil Kim
Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Systems Microbiology Research Center, Deajeon 305-806, South Korea
E-Mail:
Interests: bioinformatics; database development; comparative genomics; cheminformatics; molecular modeling; computer aided drug design

Dear Colleagues,

Antibiotics can be defined as low-molecular weight substances that have a cidal (killing) effect or a static (inhibitory) effect on a range of microbes, as secondary metabolites by certain groups of microorganisms.

The modern era of antimicrobial chemotherapy began in 1929 with Fleming’s discovery of the powerful bacteriocidal substrance penicillin G from Pennicilium notatum, and Domagk’s discovery in 1935 of synthetic chemicals (sulfonamides) with broad antimicrobial activity.

The most important property of an antimicrobial agent, from the standpoint of host, is its selective toxicity, i.e., the agent acts in some way that inhibits or kills bacterial pathogens but has little or no toxic effect on the host. Until these days, many efforts have been invested in development of new powerful antibiotics with specific narrow spectrum. In the consequence of growing problems of pathogenic organism which are resistant to conventional antibiotics, however, development of new class of antibiotics has become strongly required.

In the past 15 years, hundreds of antimicrobial agents have been isolated from a wide variety of plants, invertebrates, amphibians, and mammals, as well as bacteria and fungi. The widespread occurrence of these antimicrobial agents suggests a key role in host defense. Antimicrobial agent whose main advantage are as factors of innate immunity so that they can promptly synthesized upon induction as low molecular cost, can be easily stored in a large amount, and act against invasion by occasional and obligate pathogens.

Computational advances in structure based drug design are presented which emphasize the development of protocols and methodology used in force-field parameterization, scoring function development, structure prediction and validation, and docking.

Computational chemistry and molecular modeling are the science of representing molecular structures numerically and simulating their behavior with the equations of quantum and classical physics. Molecular modeling was extended to wide concept that design new antimicrobial agent through that predicted three-dimension structure of molecule and property of antimicrobial agent by theoretical calculation.

Dooil Kim, Ph.D.
Guest Editor

Submission

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• antibiotic resistance
• pathogen
• lead compound
• secondary metabolites (such as tannins, terpenoids, alkaloids, and flavonoids)
• phytochemicals