Abstract
Antibiotics have changed human health and revolutionised medical practice since the Second World War. Today, the use of antibiotics is increasingly limited by the rise of antimicrobial-resistant strains. Additionally, broad-spectrum antibiotic activity is not adapted to maintaining a balanced microbiome essential for human health. Targeted antimicrobials could overcome these two drawbacks. Although the rational design of targeted antimicrobial molecules presents a formidable challenge, in nature, targeted genetically encoded killing molecules are used by microbes in their natural ecosystems. The use of a synthetic biology approach allows the harnessing of these natural functions. In this commentary article we illustrate the potential of applying synthetic biology towards bacteriocins to design a new generation of antimicrobials.
Highlights
Antimicrobials are compounds that kill or inhibit the growth of microorganisms
Better management of the Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) problem includes targeted antimicrobials that have been reported as alternatives to broad-spectrum antibiotics, such as CRISPR-Cas (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats-associated protein) antimicrobials, phage therapy, local release of toxins, and use of suicidal conjugative plasmid systems and bacteriocins
It has been shown that Staphylococcus aureus is responsible for severe skin and deep tissue infections, whereas Staphylococcus epidermis plays an important role in maintaining skin health by restricting the growth of S. aureus [91,92]
Summary
Antimicrobials are compounds that kill or inhibit the growth of microorganisms. It could be argued that the availability of antimicrobials, mainly in the form of antibiotics, has been the most significant scientific achievement of the twentieth century, improving human quality of life and increasing life expectancy. Thanks to the vast amount of genomic data available today, the use of bioinformatics in combination with synthetic biology can serve to identify and produce novel antimicrobials through mining of genomic and metagenomic sequencing data for biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) followed by engineered production of the antibacterial gene products [2]. With this commentary article, we would like to highlight some of the existing alternatives to broad-spectrum antibiotics facilitated by the rise of synthetic biology. All these approaches have in common that basic knowledge of biology, including ecology, is required at the molecular level to develop these new therapeutic avenues
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