Incidence and mortality from infectious diseases have increased during the past decade. One of the main reasons is the drug resistance of bacteria, which leads to the appearance of the so-called “superbugs” (i.e., bacteria with extensive or total resistance to commonly used antibiotics). These superbugs, are mostly generated from normal strains of bacteria, including
In this issue, Pham et al. [7] report the synthesis of 12 new compounds derived from thiazolidin-4-one, followed by evaluation of their antimicrobial activity. Their article, “Antimicrobial activity of some novel 2-(2-iodophenylimino)-5-arylidenethiazolidin-4-one derivatives”, describes a simple method to synthesize antibacterial molecules with high yields (>50%) for all compounds. The chemical structures of these compounds have been elucidated by the authors using spectroscopic methods, including infrared spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, and nuclear magnetic resonance. Although no compounds show antifungal activity against
Although well conducted, there are some limitations to the present work. The synthesis is a multistep process, which makes it difficult for industrial scale-up. Moreover, the types of bacteria tested were limited to 5 strains.