Engineering molecular theranostic probes for antibacterial therapy

Bacteria-caused infections have become one of the most notorious diseases threatening human life and health worldwide. Nonetheless, the increase in antibiotic resistance plus drawbacks of traditional bacterial identification techniques and antibiotics has severely limited bacterial diagnosis and treatment. In contrast, the applications of molecular theranostic probes in antimicrobial therapy have been thriving in the past 5 years. Nevertheless, there are no systematic reviews regarding molecular theranostic probes for bacterial infection. It is thus significant and urgent to summarize the latest research progress in molecular theranostic-based antibacterial therapy. This review summarizes various types of design strategies for molecular bacterial theranostics integrated fluorescence imaging (FLI) and various antibacterial therapies. Further, the challenges and prospects of current antimicrobial theranostic probes are well-demonstrated and discussed. We expect this review delivers general rules for the ongoing development of molecular theranostics in bacterial killing and promotes the preclinical and clinical studies of bacteria-related diseases.