ABSTRACT

The use of antibiotics has made possible solid organ transplants, survival of immunosuppressed patients, surgeries, and other medical procedures in which bacterial infections are prevalent. The antibiotic resistance has always been present in bacteria, even before the use of antibiotics as a medical molecule. Antibiotic resistance is common in contemporary and ancient environmental bacteria, and the genes associated to this phenotype are similar to those present in pathogens. The groups of antibiotics that are widely used have as their main mechanism of action the inhibition of four processes in bacteria: biosynthesis of cell wall, protein biosynthesis, DNA replication and repair, and the biosynthesis of folate coenzyme. In the “genes to metabolites” approach, bioinformatic methodologies to mining genomes in order to find non-ribosomal peptides (NRPs) consist of the identification of NRP synthetase clusters, to then determine their A-domains and the amino acids they pick up in specific way, to determine the peptide sequences.