Innovative approaches to novel antibacterial drug discovery

Increasing antibiotic resistance in microorganisms and new emerging pathogens have become a major problem in our society. Rising to satisfy this urgent medical need is a recent confluence of powerful new drug discovery technologies: combinatorial chemistry; sequence and functional genomic analysis; and novel methods of high-throughput screening. The combination of these technologies will bring to bear untapped power in the search for new antimicrobials. (C) Current Biology Ltd ISSN 0958-1669.