BIOCHEMICAL STUDIES ON SOME ANTIMICROBIAL AGENTS

Abstract

Nowadays synthetic antimicrobial agents play a large part in the control of various infectious diseases. The use of these agents is an important landmark indicative of the rapid development of synthetic techniques. Modern medicine is dependent on chemotherapeutic agents, chemical agents that are used to treat disease. Chemotherapeuic agents destroy pathogenic microorganisms or inhibit their growth at concentration low enough to avoid undesirable damage to the host. Most of these agents are antibiotics, microbial products or their derivatives that can kill susceptible microorganisms or inhibit their growth (Lansing et al, 1999). There is a worldwide rapid increase in pathogenic bacteria, which are multi-resistant to antibiotics. Since the development of the first commercially available antibiotic penicillin, the high expectations by man in the healing power of these “wonder drugs” has not been fulfilled due to the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. The problem has increased dramatically in recent years with the emergence of multi-resistant strains of bacteria. Currently available antibiotics cannot treat infections caused by these bacteria (often prevalent in hospitals). There is therefore a pressing need to develop new antibiotics and novel antimicrobial agents (Karl et aL, 2001). Several research centers around the world are now involved in such efforts, which resulted in the production of several new members of synthetic compounds such as quinolones (Schentag, 2000) , semi - synthetic penicillin’s (Bijev et al.t 2000) and P -lactam antibiotics (Sunagawa et al., 2000). No antibiotic is completely free of deleterious side effect on the host. Side effects of even the least toxic drugs range from rare but lethal reactions (e.g. irreversible and fatal a plastic anemia resulting from chlorampheniclo). Or allergic reactions against the drug (e.g. penicillin hypersensitivity), to opportunistic infections by drug resistant organisms as a consequence of the inhibition of the normal flora by the antibiotic. Chemical modification of antibiotics has been adopted worldwide to achieve the desired requirement of low toxicity to host, high efficiency of killing the invading bacteria and active against resistant resistant ones (Nicolaou & Christopher, 2001),