How Does Bioinformatics Play a Role in Fungal Drug Discovery?

Despite all the medical advancements and discoveries over the past several decades, approximately 30% of all known diseases can be currently treated with available pharmacological agents. However, the discovery of new pharmaceutical drugs is one of the most important tasks in biomedical research, both scientifically and economically. Moreover, fungi are prolific producers of a wide variety of natural products. Recent developments in synthetic biology, genetics, bioinformatics, and natural product chemistry have significantly improved our ability to mine fungal genomes for the discovery of novel medications. Thus, to combat the emergence of antibiotic resistance and drug interactions, particularly in immunocompromised patients, there is an urgent need for novel antifungal drugs with novel mechanisms of action. Similarly, drug discovery is a complex process in which drug design is based on mainly two approaches, such as receptor-based drug design and ligand-based drug design, respectively. In this book chapter, we mainly emphasize combinatorial approaches from genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics research in the development and identification of novel drugs, with a special focus on human mycoses. In addition to this, the framework of bioinformatics findings, advantages, and limitations of fungal drug discovery was obtained by data integration from pharmacology and other associated fields.