Tuberculosis and other mycobacterial diseases are considered to be one of the most important problems of contemporary health service. Since 1985 and particularly in the 1990s and at present the search for new structures of antimycobacterial agents have ranked among the foremost areas of chemotherapeutic research. The present review paper is already the 18 th communication in a group of review papers about substances with antituberculotic effects, and the third, final, communication devoted in this series about the development of new antimycobacterial agents to ortho-condensed heterocyclic compounds in recent 15 years. The classification of ortho-condensed compounds is based on six-membered heterocyclic substructural fragments and the present study deals with the substructural fragments containing a greater number of different heteroatoms. The literature search is based on the journal Chemical Abstracts, Current Awareness in Biomedicine, part Mycobacteria, and original papers. Current Awareness in Biomedicine is, however, a very imperfect literature search source, recording only a fraction of communications. Review papers about five-membered heterocyclic antituberculotic ortho-condensed compounds was published in the present journal in 1999.

        Key words: tuberculostatics – heterocycles – mycobacteria