Recent Developments of Antibiotic Research and Classification of Antibiotics According to Chemical Structure

This chapter presents a classification system for antibiotics according to their chemical structure. It gives an exhaustive picture about the main trends in present antibiotic research. Chemical structure is the unique property which unambiguously distinguishes one antibiotic from another. It is this chemical structure that determines all its physical, chemical, microbiological, pharmacological, and finally clinical properties. Antibiotics of similar structural skeleton mostly exhibit similar overall microbiological activity. Owing to the tremendous development of structure elucidation methods, the exact structure of 1255 microbial, and altogether more than 1700 natural, antibiotics is known. Additionally, about 800 structures have been elucidated to a sufficient extent for meaningful classification. The known chemical and physical characteristics of about 1000 antibiotics suffice for a tentative classification too. In the past 2-3 years, further completely new types of antibiotics have been described. A series (II-XXII) of antibiotics representing completely new types of agents has been listed.