 Hey everybody, Dr. O. I'm going to do a couple of videos here where we talk about antibiotics that work by inhibiting nucleic acid, DNA, and RNA synthesis in bacteria. So we're going to talk about rifampin here. So rifampin's the drug that's in the class, rifamycin. It's a semi-synthetic antibiotic. It actually is effective against gram-positive and some gram-negative bacteria, but really it's famous for and primarily used to treat mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of TB tuberculosis. One of the reasons it's so important is that it can get to the TB that's hiding in our tissues, right? You can have these latent TB infections where rifampin is able to go and inside the macrophages and get to the hiding mycobacterium tuberculosis. So as far as how it works, it actually interferes with RNA polymerase, which would be an enzyme that allows bacteria to turn DNA into RNA. We have RNA polymerase as well, but they're structurally different. So rifampin should only impact the RNA polymerase of bacterial cells and not ours, making it a good, selectively toxic drug. We've talked about why it's when it's primarily used in combination with other drugs to treat tuberculosis, a very important infection to treat. It can cause liver enzymes to be elevated. This is one of several reasons why you need to monitor your liver function, why you're being treated for tuberculosis. And also, TB treatment takes a long time, so you do got to keep an eye on this over time. Probably the last thing that's kind of interesting about this, this is the drug that leads to like an orangish or reddish color to your body fluids, like urine, sweat, semen, really anything can have an orangish hue to it, so it's an interesting side effect more than anything. All right, so that is rifampin. I will cover the other important antimicobacterial or antitubercular drugs in other videos. So that is rifampin. I hope this helps. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.