The drug resistance phenomenon in microbes is resulting in the ineffectiveness of available drugs to treat the infections. Thus, there is a continued need to discover new molecules to combat the drug resistance phenomenon. Norfloxacin is a fluoroquinolone antibiotic that is used for the treatment of urinary tract infections. In this research work, norfloxacin is structurally modified by hybridizing with a range of substituted acetohydrazidic moieties through a multistep reaction. The first step involves the coupling of norfloxacin 1 with methyl chloroacetate followed by the treatment with hydrazine hydrate to result in corresponding acetohydrazide 3. A range of substituted benzaldehydes were reacted with the acetohydrazide to form the targeted series of norfloxacin derivatives 4a-i. The final compounds were screened for antimicrobial activity. Among the tested compounds, 4c, 4d, 4e and 4f displayed better antifungal activity against F.avenaceum, while compound 4c and 4e were active against F. bubigeum.
α-Glucosidase inhibitors occupy a prominent position among the various treatments of type-2 diabetes mellitus (DM2). In this study, a series of new norfloxacin-acetanilide hybrid molecules were synthesized and screened for α-glucosidase inhibition activity. The synthetic methodology involves the synthesis of a series of α-bromoacetanilides by condensing bromoacetyl bromide with various substituted anilines. These α-bromoacetanilides were coupled with norfloxacin in DMF to get the titled hybrids. The structure elucidation of synthesized compounds were characterized by 1H NMR, 13C NMR and LC-MS. Finally, the compounds were screened for their α-glucosidase inhibition activity using acarbose as a reference drug (IC50 =58 μM). Among the tested compounds, 3i and 3j displayed potent α-glucosidase inhibition activity with IC50 values of 7.81±0.038 and 5.55±0.012 μM respectively. In-addition, 3m, 3f and 3k were demonstrated moderate alpha-glucosidase inhibition activities with IC50 values of 52.905±0.041, 23.79± 0.087 and 23.06±0.026 μM respectively. The structure-activity relationship was established with the help of molecular docking by using Molecular Operating Environment software (MOE 2014).