Question

Pharmaceutical Interventions: Antimicrobial drugs target one of five possible cellular targets. Pick one target and describe the mechanism of antimicrobial treatment. Provide an example of a drug that utilizes this mechanism and decide if antimicrobial resistance is a concern with this drug.

Answer 1

Antimicrobial drugs, or most commonly called antibiotics perform as bactericidal via a number of mechanisms that target various cellular processes specific to bacteria and not to the host. One such category of antimicrobial are Aminoglycosides. They target the translation process by binding to the 30S subunit of ribosome during translation, causing misreading of the mRNA being translated at the moment. This misreading lead to the production of abnormal peptides that fail to fold into proper 3D structure and the cell initiate the unfolded protein response leading to the death of the bacterial cell.

However, aminoglycosides encounter several degree of resistance from the bacteria. The first step of resistance comes from the faulty or decreased entry of the molecule into the cell mediated by the chromosome. The level of resistance is moderate. Secondly aminoglycosides may not bind to the 30S ribosome due to small mutations at the only binding site. Thirdly the bacterial cells possess several aminoglycoside altering enzymes that are coded in plasmids and transposons and are thought to be derived from the bacteria that naturally produce aminoglycosides. Examples of such enzymes are N-Acetyltransferases, O-Acetyltransferases etc. These mechanisms allow bacteria to escape killing and certainly these drugs now face a resistance concern in treatment of various bacterial infection induced illness.