The impact of transcriptome and proteome analyses on antibiotic drug discovery.

Recent scientific publications demonstrate the increasing interest in measurement of genome-wide gene expression on transcript and protein level in response to treatment with antibacterial agents. Nevertheless, the number of large bacterial transcriptome and proteome datasets available so far is limited, although a high number and diversity of antibiotic-triggered expression profiles aid to optimally exploit these technologies. The first published examples substantiate the need to establish these so-called reference compendia of bacterial expression profiles, to discover the molecular mechanism-of-action of uncharacterized bioactive substances. In addition, such compendia open up ways for novel cell-based drug screening approaches.