The discovery of potent, relatively nontoxic antimicrobial therapeutic agents was perhaps the foremost medical advance of the twentieth century. Antimicrobial agents include antiseptics, antibiotics, preservatives, sterilants, and dis-infectants; all have the capacity to kill or suppress the growth of microorganisms. Antimicrobial agents are an essential compo-nent of the practice of medicine. They are used to treat, prevent, and control the dissemination of bacterial pathogens in and on animal tissue and nonliving materials. The term antibiotic has been traditionally reserved for compounds that are naturally pro-duced by living microorganisms, such as bacteria and fungi. The term has come to be more widely applied to any natural, semi-synthetic, or synthetic molecule used to treat or prevent disease. Antibiotics target anabolic cellular processes such as cell wall synthesis, DNA replication, RNA transcription, and messenger RNA (mRNA) translation. Although numerous antibiotic classes have been discovered, with different modes of action, bacteria evolve and adopt numerous strategies to counteract the action of antibiotics.
đang được dịch, vui lòng đợi..
