Microbes and Antibiotics

This is an excellent starting point for research on antibiotics. The site contains a large list of antibiotics that is arranged into different structural classes. This review describes a book that provides an excellent background on the types of antibiotics, their synthesis and their mechanisms of action. This timeline shows the dates of introduction of new antibiotics. It should be noted that the major classes of antibiotics were largely discovered more than 40 years ago and that many recent antibiotics are elaborations on existing antibiotic structures. Are we running out of antibiotics? This article for a general audience lays out the idea that the discovery of new types of antibiotics has fallen off in recent years and that antibiotic resistance is increasingly a problem in the practice of medicine. Long-term, sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics can increase weight gain for a given dietary intake. This has positive implications for purposeful increase in the weight of farm animals but negative consequences for humans where obesity is a major current health concern. Silver makes antibiotics more effective