Novel organic-inorganic nanohybrids (MnO2 and Ag nanoparticles functionalized 5-methoxy-2-mercaptobenzimidazole): One step synthesis and characterization

The optimism of the early period of antimicrobial discovery has been tempered by the emergence of bacterial strains with resistance to these therapeutics. Today, clinically important bacteria are characterized not only by single drug resistance but also by multiple antibiotic resistance--the legacy of past decades of antimicrobial use and misuse. Drug resistance presents an ever-increasing global public health threat that involves all major microbial pathogens and antimicrobial drugs.

Antibiotic-resistant strains of pathogenic bacteria are increasingly prevalent in hospitals and the community. New antibiotics are needed to combat these bacterial pathogens, but progress in developing them has been slow. Historically, most antibiotics have come from a small set of molecular scaffolds whose functional lifetimes have been extended by generations of synthetic tailoring. The emergence of multidrug resistance among the latest generation of pathogens suggests that the discovery of new scaffolds should be a priority. Promising approaches to scaffold discovery are emerging; they include mining underexplored microbial niches for natural products, designing screens that avoid rediscovering old scaffolds, and repurposing libraries of synthetic molecules for use as antibiotics.