Antibiotic "megacluster" discovery provides new strategy to fight superbugs
Eureka in genome mining
It’s “an exciting advance in efforts to restock the antibiotic arsenal.”
This is a slide culture of a Streptomyces sp. grown on tap water agar, 1972. Credit: Getty | CDC
Antibiotic resistance has loomed over humans since the moment we started using antibiotics. In the 20th century, the drugs downgraded potentially life-threatening bacterial infections to mere inconveniences—a miracle of modern medicine, it seemed. But the drugs aren’t really a human invention; we mostly swiped them from microbes, which have been locked in an arms race with each other for centuries. Microbial evolution has crafted both deadly molecules and clever tricks to dodge death as the wee organisms endlessly battle over turf and resources. More than 80 percent of the antibiotics used in clinics today are based on those turf-war weapons, which scientists refer to as “natural products.”
For decades, humans mined antibiotic molecules from microbes and...
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