Antibiotic

An antibiotic is a drug that kills or slows the growth of bacteria. Antibiotics are one class of antimicrobials, a larger group which also includes anti-viral, anti-fungal, and anti-parasitic drugs. They are relatively harmless to the host, and therefore can be used to treat infections. The term, coined by Selman Waksman, originally described only those formulations derived from living organisms, in contradistinction to "chemotherapeutic agents", which were purely synthetic. Nowadays the term "antibiotic" is also applied to synthetic antimicrobials, such as the sulfonamides. Antibiotics are small molecules with a molecular weight less than 2000. They are not enzymes.

Beyond antibiotics

Unfortunately, the comparative ease of finding compounds which safely cured bacterial infections proved much harder to duplicate with respect to fungal and viral infections. Antibiotic research led to great strides in our knowledge of basic biochemistry and to the current biological revolution; but in the process it was discovered that the susceptibility of bacteria to many compounds which are safe to humans is based upon significant differences between the cellular and molecular physiology of the bacterial cell and that of the mammalian cell. In contrast, despite the seemingly huge differences between fungi and humans, the basic biochemistries of the fungal cell and the mammalian cell are much more similar; so much so that there are few therapeutic opportunities for compounds to attack a fungal cell which will not harm a human cell. Similarly, we know now that viruses represent an incredibly minimal intracellular parasite, being stripped down to a few genes worth of DNA or RNA and the minimal molecular equipment needed to enter a cell and actually take over the machinery of the cell to produce new viruses. Thus, the great bulk of viral metabolic biochemistry is not merely similar to human biochemistry, it actually is human biochemistry, and the possible targets of antiviral compounds are restricted to the relatively very few components of the actual virus itself.

Related Topics:
DNA - RNA

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