Discovery of antibacterial manganese(i) tricarbonyl complexes through combinatorial chemistry.

The continuous rise of antimicrobial resistance is a serious threat to human health and already causing hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. While natural products and synthetic organic small molecules have provided the majority of our current antibiotic arsenal, they are falling short in providing new drugs with novel modes of action able to treat multidrug resistant bacteria. Metal complexes have recently shown promising results as antimicrobial agents, but the number of studied compounds is still vanishingly small, making it difficult to identify promising compound classes or elucidate structure-activity relationships.