Introducing April's SLAS Discovery Cover Article: Addressing Antimicrobial Resistance through New Medicinal and Synthetic Chemistry Strategies

Oak Brook, IL (USA) — March 20, 2019 — The April cover article of SLAS Discovery features “Addressing Antimicrobial Resistance through New Medicinal and Synthetic Chemistry Strategies,” by Monika I. Konaklieva, Ph.D., an online ahead-of-print article first published in December 2018.

Konaklieva’s article focuses on the current medicinal/organic chemistry strategies aimed at addressing the decline of the effectiveness of antibiotics due to the emergence of drug-resistant microorganisms. More specifically, this study focuses on methods of developing diverse libraries of complex scaffolds, including diversity-oriented synthesis (DOS), complexity-to-diversity (CtD), fragment-based lead generation (FBLG), DNA-encoded chemical libraries and design-to-function strategy.

The study was borne out of an emerging challenge: rethinking the strategies of antimicrobial drug design. Antimicrobials have different physicochemical properties compared to most other drug classes, and the aforementioned organic synthetic strategies are directed toward addressing the specific requirements for a successful antibacterial structure. Moreover, a swift feedback mechanism between the preparation of a given synthetic organic entity and changes in cell morphology/gene expression that this synthetic product could trigger, becomes vital for future success of the synthetic efforts of the antimicrobials.

Monika I. Konaklieva is a professor of chemistry at American University (Washington, DC, USA). She holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the State University of New York at Buffalo (Buffalo, NY, USA) and specializes in synthetic organic chemistry and structural drug design, with a particular focus on delaying microbial resistance.

April’s SLAS Discovery cover article can be accessed at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2472555218812657 through April 20. For more information about SLAS and its journals, visit www.slas.org/publications/slas-discovery/.

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SLAS (Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening) is an international community of 19,000 professionals and students dedicated to life sciences discovery and technology. The SLAS mission is to bring together researchers in academia, industry and government to advance life sciences discovery and technology via education, knowledge exchange and global community building.

SLAS Discovery: 2017 Impact Factor 2.355. Editor-in-Chief Robert M. Campbell, Ph.D., Eli Lilly and Company, Indianapolis, IN (USA). SLAS Discovery (Advancing Life Sciences R&D) was previously published (1996-2016) as the Journal of Biomolecular Screening (JBS).

SLAS Technology: 2017 Impact Factor 2.632. Editor-in-Chief Edward Kai-Hua Chow, Ph.D., National University of Singapore (Singapore). SLAS Technology (Translating Life Sciences Innovation) was previously published (1996-2016) as the Journal of Laboratory Automation (JALA).

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