Integrating Omics Technologies for Prospective Antimicrobial Drug Development

 Infectious diseases remain a serious global public health threat. Increasing frequencies of deadly infections caused by microbial pathogens and their rapid resistance development to existing antibiotics in market makes the treatment procedure less effective, which underscore the need for vigilance in continuing war against the microbial pathogens[1]. The drug discovery effort needs high throughput and novel technologies to keep up with the emerging problem of antimicrobial drug resistance. Several tools have been implemented in drug discovery and development process. However, controversies concerning with high throughput drug screening, difficulties in characterizing drug actions, cost effectiveness of antimicrobial drug research have hindered the drug discovery processes[2]. During recent years, omics technologies have revolutionized the field of cellular and molecular biology, which fostered great hopes in antimicrobial research[3]. Omic technologies have broad range of applications that primarily involved mining of genes (genomics), mRNA (transcriptomics), proteins (proteomics) and metabolites (metabolomics).