Translations:Flavin adenine dinucleotide/54/en

New design of anti-bacterial medications is of continuing importance in scientific research as bacterial antibiotic resistance to common antibiotics increases. A specific metabolic protein that uses FAD (Complex II) is vital for bacterial virulence, and so targeting FAD synthesis or creating FAD analogs could be a useful area of investigation. Already, scientists have determined the two structures FAD usually assumes once bound: either an extended or a butterfly conformation, in which the molecule essentially folds in half, resulting in the stacking of the adenine and isoalloxazine rings. FAD imitators that are able to bind in a similar manner but do not permit protein function could be useful mechanisms of inhibiting bacterial infection. Alternatively, drugs blocking FAD synthesis could achieve the same goal; this is especially intriguing because human and bacterial FAD synthesis relies on very different enzymes, meaning that a drug made to target bacterial FAD synthase would be unlikely to interfere with the human FAD synthase enzymes.