Inhibitors of the Translational Apparatus

Dear Colleagues,

This issue of Antibiotics is dedicated to the topic of the translational apparatus as antimicrobial target. Protein synthesis is an essential function in all living organisms and despite evolutionary conservation, the actors that take part in this process in bacteria, lower and higher eukaryotes display enough differences so as to make the translational apparatus an ideal target for antibiotics. Indeed, approximately half of all antimicrobials known so far, belonging to various classes of antibiotics, interfere with translational functions.

This Special Issue will summarize the current knowledge on bacterial and/or yeast protein synthesis and its inhibition by antimicrobials. Thus, research as well as review articles focused on the characterization of various aspects (e.g., therapeutic properties, mechanism of action, resistance mechanisms etc.) of antibiotics targeting one or more functions of the translational apparatus are invited.

To ensure that the issue contains high quality contributions submitted manuscripts will be peer-reviewed under my supervision.

Prof. Dr. Claudio O. Gualerzi
Guest Editor

Knud H. Nierhaus

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

It is with deep sadness and grief that we learned of our friend and colleague Knud Hermann Nierhaus  passing away on the 7^th of April, 2016. He died prematurely, unexpectedly, and quite suddenly on the eve of his 75^th birthday. We are to mourn a personality who devoted his life to research, while sharing it with his family and his friends. This Special Issue of Antibiotics is dedicated to his memory.

Knud was born in Bochum, Germany, in 1941. After having studied medicine at the Universities of Tübingen and Vienna, he received his doctoral degree in 1967. He then spent two years as a medical assistant in various hospitals, before he joined the Department of Heinz Günter Wittmann at the newly founded Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin-Dahlem. There he continued his extended career as a group leader, and after his retirement, as a guest scientist from 2010 onward, as well as a guest scientist at the Charité Berlin. In addition, since his studies at the Technical University Berlin in 1976, he regularly taught as a professor of molecular biology. As visible signs of his international reputation, he became an Elected Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 1984, and he was named Adjunct Professor of Molecular Biology at the Lomonosov University in Moscow in 1999, Distinguished International Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008, and Dr. honoris causa at the University of Patras, Greece, in 2009.

Knud has made numerous and important contributions to the field of ribosome and protein biosynthesis research. He is particularly well remembered for his seminal work on ribosome assembly, his functional and structural analyses of the ribosomal elongation cycle including the peptidyl transferase reaction, his work on translational regulation, and the inhibition mechanisms of numerous antibiotics. Among his widely acknowledged achievements in the 1970s was the total reconstitution of the large subunit from E. coli ribosomes, which greatly helped to understand processes of molecular self-assembly more generally. During the 1980s and the 1990s, he established the three tRNA binding site-model of the ribosomal elongation cycle as a ubiquitous feature of protein synthesis in all organismal kingdoms. At the same time, he investigated the three-dimensional structure of the large bacterial ribosomal subunit by means of neutron scattering; and from the late 1990s onward, he has been deeply involved in the cryo-electron microscopic inspection of functional states of the ribosome, as well as the modulation of protein biosynthesis by non-standard factors under conditions of stress and starvation. Since his first great paper on the ribosomal binding protein of chloramphenicol in 1973, he kept a keen interest in the elucidation of the inhibition mechanisms of antibiotics that intervene in the biosynthesis of proteins throughout his career.

I had the opportunity and pleasure of being associated with the group of Knud Nierhaus throughout the 1980s, and to experience the excitement with which he relentlessly accompanied and stimulated our efforts. Still today, I am immensely grateful for this time of apprenticeship in such a lively and international environment. Knud was a great teacher in experimentation. The community of ribosomologists all over the world will miss his constant-stimulating presence, keep him in good memory, and his work in high esteem.

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Antibiotics is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.