Antibiotics: Actions, Origins, Resistance

This new text offers a comprehensive, up to date account of those structural classes of antibiotics that have had an impact in human infectious disease. While most of the attention is on natural products with antibiotic activity elaborated by microbes to act as chemical weapons on neighboring bacteria, synthetic chemicals with antibiotic activity are also discussed. The book opens with an introduction to antibiotics, followed by a section that examines how antibiotics block specific proteins acting in these essential bacterial processes and how the molecular structure of the small-molecule drugs enables their antibiotic activity. Section III explores the development of bacterial resistance to antibiotics,…