Symposium on the mode of action of antibiotics.

Abstract

A consideration of the modes of action of five antibiotics may appear too ambitious for a single symposium. However, there is a unifying basic problem in the study of why chemotherapeutic agents are useful in the treatment of infectious processes. These agents are useful because they restrict the pathology induced by invading microorganisms without serious or irreparable damage to the host; this implies that it is possible to circumvent, at least quantitatively, certain aspects of comparative biochemistry. While speculation reveals numerous possible explanations, devising critical experiments to support one explanation uniquely has been exceedingly difficult. The cell catalysts are not widely different in chemical nature and it has been observed that even with the presumably specific competitive inhibition we have examples where more than one enzyme is interfered with by a single metabolite analogue. Possibly each agent may exhibit a number of toxic reactions that contribute to the therapeutic effectiveness. On the other hand, although it is reasonable to assume that the widely diverse chemical structures will exhibit diversity of action, it is still possible that a single basic mechanism may be responsible. As yet no final solution to the mode of action is in hand. This symposium brings together the diverse approaches of a number of active investigators of antibiotic action and their evaluation of the work of others. So many different biological systems have been reported to be affected by some of the antibiotics that one might question how a summation of these could be useful at the present time. Yet, one must remember that when properly cor-