Impact of Microbial Genomics Approaches for Novel Antibiotic Target

Infectious diseases are life-threatening and may lead to high mortality and morbidity rates. The existing danger of an increase and spread of multidrug resistance pathogens is a global concern. Therefore, the designing of novel antibiotics and vaccine to control and eliminate the disease is an utmost requirement. Traditional approaches for screening vaccine and drug targets are time-consuming and have been unsuccessful in controlling the spread of infectious diseases due to several reasons such as altered antigenic diversity, altered virulence potential, and antimicrobial resistance in the infectious agent population. To overcome this problem, there has been a paradigm shift from the conventional to microbial genomics approaches, as the availability of complete genome sequence of pathogenic microorganisms and multiple isolates of the same species provides a wealth of information on nearly all the potential drug targets. Microbial genomics approaches open up new avenues to pursuit novel antimicrobial agents that are highly conserved in a range of microbes, essential for the survival of pathogens and absent in humans. In this chapter, we present an overview of the microbial genomics approaches such as pan-genomics, comparative genomics, functional genomics, structural genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics used in the discovery and development of novel antibiotics.