The Future is Still Ahead: Methodologies for Discovering New Antimicrobials within the World Biodiversity

The use of antimicrobials is essential to treat infectious diseases worldwide. However, the abusive and/or inappropriate use of these molecules have contributed to the development of resistant bacterial strains, restricting the current treatment options. This resistance phenomenon boosts the need for searching new antibacterial molecules to treat human and animal populations. Currently places and countries with high biodiversity such as Brazilian Amazon forest and Brazil, which is member of a group with 17 mega diverse countries, are pointed as promising environments for identifying new antibiotics and still have to be explored. However this biotechnological potential is far from getting to the population as these countries neither open their biodiversity to others nor efficiently explore it. In this work we aim to briefly review some of the simplest in vitro and in silico laboratory methodologies to identify new antimicrobial prototypes to stimulate these countries to explore their own biodiversity as well as to other countries that are interested on researching natural products and new molecules. This work intend to contribute to unveil this unexplored biodiversity world as well as to improve the development of new therapeutic options to fight against bacterial infections worldwide.