One cannot rule them all: Are bacterial toxins-antitoxins druggable?

Chan, Wai Ting; Balsa, Dolors; Espinosa, Manuel

Thus, PNAs can mimic and pair to DNA or RNA generating duplexes that are resistant to enzymatic degradation. Although PNAs have been proven as good silencer, delivery would be one of the major challenges that are not easy to tackle (Ray and Nordén 2000) . The coupling of antisense molecules with modified peptides called membrane-penetrating peptides has been explored as useful antibacterials. One of the fascinating examples is peptide-conjugated PMOs. These compounds are synthetic oligomers mimicking the nucleic acid structure, with one end attached to a short peptide. The peptide is designed with a repeating sequence of cationic and non-polar amino acid residues that facilitate the oligomer to penetrate the Gram-negative outer membrane. These conjugated compounds can be targeted to silencing specific genes and that have been shown to be an active antibacterial (Geller et al., 2013) .