Eur Respir J 2005, 25:474–481.CrossRefPubMed 36. Van daele S, Vaneechoutte M, De Boeck K, Knoop C, Malfroot A, Lebecque P, Leclercq-Foucart J, Van Schil L, Desager K, De Baets F: Survey of Pseudomonas aeruginosa genotypes in colonised cystic fibrosis patients. Eur Respir J 2006, 28:740–747.CrossRefPubMed 37. Schelstraete P, Van daele S, De selleck inhibitor Boeck K, Proesmans M, Lebecque P, Leclercq-Foucart J, Malfroot A, Vaneechoutte M, De Baets F:Pseudomonas aeruginosa in the home environment of newly infected cystic

fibrosis patients. Eur Respir J 2008, 31:822–829.CrossRefPubMed Authors’ contributions MV and PD conceived the study. MV, PD, TDB designed the experiments. PD and MV wrote the paper. PD, TDB and LVS performed experiments and analyzed data. JPP, DDV, SVD and FDB helped with the research design and manuscript discussion.

SVD and FDB provided patient samples and helped Captisol mouse to draft the manuscript. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript.”
“Background Exponential growth in the amount of available genomic information has produced unprecedented opportunities to computationally predict functional genomics in biologically intractable organisms. One application of these data is facilitation of the rational drug design process. Most high throughput drug discovery techniques screen compounds for biological activity, only determining target and mechanism post hoc. An alternative approach, rational drug design, seeks to utilize genomic information to specifically identify and inhibit targets. Often these methods utilize in silico sequence analysis to choose a target protein that is important to the survival of the organism and accessible to small molecule drugs. It has been suggested that ideally

a target should fulfill four properties: 1–Essentiality to the survival or pathogenesis of the target organism, 2–Druggability, Oxalosuccinic acid having protein structure characteristics making it amenable to binding small molecule inhibitors, 3–Functional and structural characterization with established assays for Selleck RepSox screening small molecule inhibition, 4–Distinctness from current drug targets to avoid resistance [1]. These parameters are not strict rules, however. In reality, few if any pathogenic organisms have sufficiently comprehensive functional genomics information to rigorously screen based on these parameters. A large portion of the target discovery process involves weighing compromises in the selection parameters based on the quality of information available. In silico drug target prediction relies on various approximations and comparisons to identify genes which fit these parameters. Arguably, the most important parameter to assess is gene essentiality. For a compound to serve as an effective antimicrobial or anthelmintic, binding of its target gene product should kill, or at least severely attenuate the growth of the targeted organism.