Microbial Secondary Metabolites to Control Disease: A Mini-Review

Infectious diseases caused by bacteria are a major global public health threat, and due to their high impact on public health, they are a high priority in national health programs in different countries. Bacterial drug resistance has grown over the past decades, but the rate of discovery of new antibiotics has steadily decreased. Therefore, the search for new effective antibacterial agents has become a priority and has led to the development of alternative therapies and new technologies for the production of microbial products due to technical and economic advantages. The efforts of gene editing and next-generation sequencing have created an unprecedented genomic potential for the production of secondary metabolites by diverse microorganisms in the environment and microbiota. Secondary metabolites, which produce organic products with low molecular mass, play important roles in cell growth, signal transduction, nutrient search, communication, and intra- and interspecies competition. Therefore, researchers have paid increasing attention to the potential replacement of secondary metabolites instead of traditional antibiotics. As bacteria become resistant to first-generation antibiotics, treatment must be changed to second- or third-generation drugs. Indeed, the world is faced with the need to discover new potent small molecules with significant anticancer potential and favorable toxicity profile, but many anticancer drugs in clinical practice today have side effects. In this chapter of the present book, the aim is to review the prospects, costs, benefits, side effects and detailed information about the types of microbial secondary metabolites for the control of infectious diseases.