Inhibitors of bacterial two-component signalling systems.

Bacterial two-component regulatory systems (TCS) play a pivotal role in the process of infection. These signal transduction systems enable bacterial pathogens to mount an adaptive response and cope with diverse environmental stresses, including nutrient deprivation, antibiotic onslaught and phagocytosis. Interest in these systems as novel bacterial targets has been rekindled by the recent discovery of several essential systems in important Gram-positive and Gram-negative pathogens. Several series of TCS inhibitors derived from broad screening approaches have been reported in the literature, however, most appear to suffer from poor selectivity, excessive protein binding and/or limited bioavailability. Consequently, pharmaceutical chemists have turned to alternate strategies, such as the design of substrate-based inhibitors, the generation of combinatorial libraries and the isolation of natural products, to identify inhibitors with more desirable properties. Recent structural studies of the histidine protein kinase and response regulator proteins that constitute TCS may provide a foundation for a structure-based design approach to TCS inhibitors.