Switch Hitters: Antibacterial compounds target new mechanism to kill microbes

With drug-resistant bacteria on the offensive, researchers are on the lookout for novel microbial processes to disrupt. A new study provides evidence that recently discovered ribonucleic acid segments may become plum targets.

Those riboswitches, found in many bacteria, are stretches of messenger RNAs, which provide the instructions to cells for making specific proteins (SN: 4/10/04, p.