The chemistry and cellular biology of the tetracyclines

Abstract

Microbes produce a vast array of toxic chemicals as secondary metabolites in an effort to establish territory and fend off both prokaryotes and eukaryotes alike. These chemicals act as part of a defensive strategy to enable host survival in a hostile microbial environment. When microbes and man initiate “antibiosis”, a term created by Vuillemin in the late 1800s to describe when “one creature (the antibiote) destroys the life of another to preserve its own”[1], the antibiote produces and uses chemical toxins that diffuse radially outward, changing the physiological state of the offending organism by a variety of often lethal molecular mechanisms. In the long term, the antibiote antagonizes the growth and survival of intruding cells.