Development of new anti-tuberculosis drugs: the strategy of unconventional microbial culture and silencing gene activation

Abstract:

Tuberculosis (TB), caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, has become a major human infectious disease. The existing first-line and second-line TB drugs have poor treatment outcomes in patients with MDR-TB and XDR-TB. There is an urgent need for new and better drugs to treat tuberculosis due to lengthy and complex treatment regimens and a rising problem of drug resistance. Microbial-derived natural products have revealed enormous reservoirs of as yet untapped lead compounds. In this review, we discuss the strategies that have been developed in bacteria and fungi to isolation of non-culturable microorganisms and activation of silent biosynthetic gene clusters involved in the study of microbial-derived natural products. This review also highlights recent advances in microbial-derived natural products with anti-tuberculosis activity using these methods.