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What are antibiotics? Archaic functions for modern activities
Author(s) -
Davies J.
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
molecular microbiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.857
H-Index - 247
eISSN - 1365-2958
pISSN - 0950-382X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2958.1990.tb00701.x
Subject(s) - biology , effector , nucleic acid , translation (biology) , antibiotics , receptor , computational biology , biochemistry , gene , messenger rna
Summary Secondary metabolites are proposed to have played important roles in the evolution of the reactions of living forms on earth, in effecting and modulating reactions during biochemical evolution by chemical and structural interaction with ‘receptor’ sites in primitive macromolecular templates. For example, in the evolution of the translation system, as the polymerizing reactions became more complex and proteins became involved, the low molecular‐weight effectors were functionally replaced by polypeptides, but retained their ability to interact with receptor sites in nucleic acids and proteins. Many of these low molecular‐weight effectors now play a different role, that of antagonists, by interacting with the original receptor sites in contemporary activity as antibiotics.