Structural Studies of Bacterial PeptidyltRNA Hydrolase

Abstract

Bacteria are pathogenic as well as affable to human beings. There are a number of bacteria which play beneficial role in human life and the products formed by them are very useful, but, there are pathogenic bacteria also which cause infections and various types of diseases. In spite of the remarkable progress achieved by medical science over the past 60 years, there has been a resurgence of several diseases that were believed to have been conquered and also appearance of hitherto unknown infectious agents, ranging from HIV to SARS. Thus, it is very important to study the pathogenic bacteria and to find the target molecule which can be useful in discovering a drug against these pathogenic bacteria. The search for new drug targets is based on the various metabolic pathways which are essential for survival of bacteria, such as cell wall biosynthesis, amino acid, protein, lipid biosynthesis and cofactor biosynthesis. The explosive growth of knowledge in recent times, resulting from the interplay of several disciplines like molecular biology, biochemistry, bioinformatics, structural biology, and also many sections of chemistry and physics, has tremendously modified our initiative of drug research (Harrus and Baneth, 2005; http://www.who.int/neglected_diseases/en/). However, the solution lies in dealing with both disease and its related socio-economic issues effectively.