Current and Emergent Control Strategies for Medical Biofilms - Antibiofilm Agents: From Diagnosis to Treatment and Prevention - page 139

Fig. 5 Depiction of targets of various approaches acting at different stages of biofilm growth and
their interrelationship to control biofilm infections
Natural products provide a diverse array of chemical structures and possess a
plethora of biological activities. A number of natural products that possess the
ability to inhibit or disperse bacterial biofilms have been used as the starting points
for medicinal chemistry programs in which synthetic manipulation of the natural
product scaffold has allowed for the design of more efficacious compounds. Much
of the natural product inspiration for these programs has come from compounds
isolated from plants and marine organisms. It is known that QS pathways heavily
influence the formation of biofilms, in addition to the production of other virulence
factors. A diverse range of biomolecules serve as the facilitators for QS systems in
bacteria. Therefore, extensive research in this area has produced a number of
analogues with the ability to modulate QS-dependent enzymes. These molecules
compose the vast majority of compounds thus far investigated for biofilm control.
AHLs have served as one of the primary scaffolds studied over the past 30 years for
the design of potential biofilm inhibitors (Geske et al. 2008 ). A considerable
amount of work has been published involving the biological consequences of
chemically modified AHL derivatives in a variety of QS systems and reviewed by
Worthington et al. ( 2012 ). Here, we focus on using small molecules to derive novel
compounds capable of controlling biofilm-associated infections (Fig. 6 ).