Many antimicrobial drugs are poorly active against pathogenic microbes causing intracellular infections, such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis or Plasmodium falciparum. On the other hand, several known antimicrobial agents are not effective enough because of their limited cellular penetration. A common feature of both challenges is the inability of an active agent to cross the biological membrane(s). One of the possible approaches...

Structures of several dozen of known antibacterial, antifungal or antiprotozoal agents are based on the amino acid scaffold. In most of them, the amino acid skeleton is of a crucial importance for their antimicrobial activity, since very often they are structural analogs of amino acid intermediates of different microbial biosynthetic pathways. Particularly, some aminophosphonate or aminoboronate analogs of protein amino acids are...

A significant number of antiviral agents used in clinical practice are amino acids, short peptides, or peptidomimetics. Among them, several HIV protease inhibitors (e. g. lopinavir, atazanavir), HCV protease inhibitors (e. g. grazoprevir, glecaprevir), and HCV NS5A protein inhibitors have contributed to a significant decrease in mortality from AIDS and hepatitis. However, there is an ongoing need for the discovery of new antiviral...