The emergence of antibiotic resistance in bacteria is a serious threat to the public health worldwide. Riboswitches are RNA-based targets that can help produce novel antibiotics via an innovative mechanism of action not applicable for proteins. Since no bacterial riboswitch analogues exist in human genomic transcripts, it is possible to rationally design potent structural or functional analogues of the natural ligands of riboswitches, that can be exploited to starve bacterial cells of essential metabolites.
We, at the Binary Star, are utilizing a robust computational pipeline to initiate a drug discovery program for the development of antibacterials that target specific bacterial riboswitches, using a large dataset of carefully selected ligands from the Binary Star database (BDS), that have properties specific to RNA binding.