TY  - JOUR
A1  - Vogel, Jörg
T1  - An RNA biology perspective on species‐specific programmable RNA antibiotics
T2  - Molecular Microbiology
N2  - Our body is colonized by a vast array of bacteria the sum of which forms our microbiota. The gut alone harbors >1,000 bacterial species. An understanding of their individual or synergistic contributions to human health and disease demands means to interfere with their functions on the species level. Most of the currently available antibiotics are broad‐spectrum, thus too unspecific for a selective depletion of a single species of interest from the microbiota. Programmable RNA antibiotics in the form of short antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) promise to achieve precision manipulation of bacterial communities. These ASOs are coupled to small peptides that carry them inside the bacteria to silence mRNAs of essential genes, for example, to target antibiotic‐resistant pathogens as an alternative to standard antibiotics. There is already proof‐of‐principle with diverse bacteria, but many open questions remain with respect to true species specificity, potential off‐targeting, choice of peptides for delivery, bacterial resistance mechanisms and the host response. While there is unlikely a one‐fits‐all solution for all microbiome species, I will discuss how recent progress in bacterial RNA biology may help to accelerate the development of programmable RNA antibiotics for microbiome editing and other applications.
KW  - antibiotic
KW  - microbiome
KW  - RNA-seq
KW  - small RNA
Y1  - 2020
UR  - https://opus.bibliothek.uni-wuerzburg.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/21486
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-214869
VL  - 113
IS  - 3
SP  - 550
EP  - 559
ER  -