Antibiotic-resistant
strains of Enterobacteria, shown here, are increasing
at an alarming
rate. Credit: istock photo ©Scharvik
(December 9, 2015) Biologists
at UC San Diego have found that a method they developed to identify and
characterize new antibiotics can be employed to screen natural products quickly
for compounds capable of controlling antibiotic resistant bacteria.
The researchers, who published their findings in this week’s
edition of the Journal of Antibiotics, say their latest discovery could permit
chemists and others to understand how mixtures of potential antibiotics from
microorganisms work without first purifying them. It builds on their
development two years ago of a new way to rapidly identify new compounds
capable of killing bacteria.
“Our initial discovery allowed us to perform the equivalent
of an autopsy on bacterial cells and is changing the way industry searches for
new antibiotics from collections of pure chemicals,” said Kit Pogliano, a
professor of biology at UC San Diego who headed the research team. “But we
didn’t know if it would work for identifying antibiotics found in natural
product extracts, which are very complex mixtures frequently filled with
multiple types of antibiotics.”
“We’ve now shown that our method is a powerful way to
identify antibiotics from natural products and understand how they work before
they are ever purified,” she added, “potentially shaving years off of screening
efforts by identifying which organisms and growth conditions produce
interesting bioactive molecules.”