Towards an efficient synthesis of new glycopeptide antibiotics

There is an urgent need to be able to synthesize modified glycopeptide antibiotics quickly to keep up with the problem of bacterial resistance. On an industrial scale this is currently not possible, because the crucial steps of the natural antibiotic synthesis are too little understood. New detailed insights into these mechanisms offer the hope of simulating this process in the laboratory, to allow a variety of more substantially altered glycopeptide antibiotics to be produced in rapid response to developing bacterial resistance.