Advances in Computational Studies of Potential Drug Targets in Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Abstract

Tuberculosis continues to remain as one of the leading causes of death worldwide, in spite of significant progress being made in the last twenty years through increased compliance to treatment. The current review gives an overview of the recent efforts made in the endeavor to identify novel inhibitors and promising drug targets for Mycobacterium tuberculosis with structure and ligand-based approaches along with bioinformatics studies following complete sequencing of its genome. A large number of these studies target biomolecules in metabolic pathways that are vital for the survival of the microorganism. A discussion on efforts to study metalloproteins as relatively underexplored targets in the context of their druggability is also presented.