Microbe Found In Grassy Field Contains Powerful Antibiotic 84
sciencehabit writes For much of the last decade, a team of researchers in Boston has eagerly exhumed and reburied dirt. It's part of a strategy to access an untapped source of new antibiotics—the estimated 99% of microbes in the environment that refuse to grow in laboratories. Now, their technique has yielded a promising lead: a previously unknown bacterium that makes a compound with infection-killing abilities. What's more, the team claims in a report out today, the compound is unlikely to fall prey to the problem of antibiotic resistance. That suggestion has its skeptics, but if the drug makes it through clinical trials, it would be a much needed weapon against several increasingly hard-to-treat infections.
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The cure for that would also fix "Jesus is Lord" infection too.
And how many people were murdered over Piss Christ?
That would be ZERO.
Re:Will it treat the "Allahu akbar!" infection? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pathetic loser attempts to use events of a thousand fucking years ago to justify and excuse Islam-inspired mass murder just a few hours ago.
Dude, you have a Thalidomide brain.
Well then, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks [wikipedia.org].
5% of the general population are sociopaths; 1% are psychopaths. So in any sufficiently large group you you will find plenty of individuals acting in deplorable ways -- even horrifically deplorable. Christians, Muslims, rural Southerners, lesbian golfers, people who like avocados -- any group is bound to have it's share of monsters.
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You forgot Poland *scnr*
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IANA psychologist, but here's the armchair difference as I understand it: Sociopathic behavior is driven by some misguided version of self-interest, whereas psychopathic behavior acts without regard to self-interest. For a simple (over)generalization, if you piss off a murderous sociopath, he will stalk you and attempt to kill you at a time and in a manner where he believes he's most likely to get away with it. If you piss off a murderous psychopath, he will likely attempt to kill you immediately with wh
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Re:Will it treat the "Allahu akbar!" infection? (Score:4, Insightful)
And how many people were murdered over Piss Christ?
How many die in Africa from sexually transmitted disease that is preventable through prophylactic use of condoms?
Your mistake was assuming that the things that upset Muslims to irrational behavior and violence would also have a parallel in Christianity. Huge cultural difference between the people of those two religions, but both are harmful to society and quite insane.
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Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.
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I don't know if it was their intention, but it damn sure is mine. All religions need to go they way of Zeus and be remembered as nothing more than a fanciful myth.
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It totally fixes both. You just stuff the dirt with these microbes into their mouth until it is full. Then they need to snort the remainder of the dirt through their nose. Five minutes after the nose is full, the person is cured.
The hard part is yet to come (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The hard part is yet to come (Score:5, Informative)
That's exactly what they claim to have found (at least so far in tests on mice). They also assert that they think it would be extremely difficult for MRSA to adapt to this drug, as it would require a fundamental change in the structure of it as being a gram positive bacteria.
Re:The hard part is yet to come (Score:5, Informative)
Finding things that kill bacteria is easy. Finding things that kill bacteria and do not significantly harm the host, now that is the hard part.
That's exactly what they claim to have found (at least so far in tests on mice). They also assert that they think it would be extremely difficult for MRSA to adapt to this drug, as it would require a fundamental change in the structure of it as being a gram positive bacteria.
I should have specified a human host. Biotech is littered with drugs that seems to work great on test animals but have serious side effects on humans.
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I suppose we can feed it to farmed animals in great quantities instead of the usual antibiotics we feed them in great quantities.
(note there are strict withdrawal periods for all animals coming up to slaughter to ensure the antibiotics used in their feed is not present in the meat)
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Re: The hard part is yet to come (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly - evolution isn't "random". Mutations are random - but the development of specific traits requires an actual path from A to B that doesn't weaken a generation of organism too much, while still enabling them to survive the selective pressure in sufficient quantity.
That in the paper, by feeding constant low-level non-lethal doses, did not yield resistant mutants, suggests there's no easy way for MRSA to develop a resistance mechanism.
Just in time (Score:2, Funny)
The perfunctory use of antibiotics in factory farms is engineering a bacterial plague that will resist all our medicines and will be devastating once it becomes infectious to humans.
With this new antibiotic in our arsenal, we can merrily continue to pump our livestock full of antibiotics all day, without ever worrying about future harmful consequences.
We have solved this problem for good. Carry on!
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You highlighted the exact real issue:
"What they claim to have found".
It will take years to actually even start to identify the damage this new antibiotic may have on the body. From a medical perspective we are still in the process of assessing just how harmful existing antibiotics are on the body for example.
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>From a medical perspective we are still in the process of assessing just how harmful existing antibiotics are on the body for example.
A non-issue. Or are you against, say, high-dosage chemotherapy too?
I don't think it is an issue of the OP being against it as much as an issue of not knowing what the blubbery fuck the OP is talking about
Re:The hard part is yet to come (Score:5, Funny)
Are you saying it shouldn't be used to save someone about to die from an otherwise untreatable bacterial infection? If so, you have a future at the FDA!
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From a medical perspective, you're talking out of your backside. We are quite aware of the harms caused by existing antibiotics. Generally, they are significantly outweighed by the benefits of not dying from infections.
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I thought I read that they tested it against cultured human cells in a petri dish, without bad side-effects. That's not whole-animal testing, but it's better than no human testing at all.
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Finding things that kill bacteria is easy.
Like handguns [xkcd.com]? :D
Finding things that kill bacteria and do not significantly harm the host, now that is the hard part.
Details.
Re:The hard part is yet to come (Score:5, Informative)
You didn't read the paywalled article [nature.com], did you?
The antibiotic blocks the bacterial cell wall synthesis. Animals don't have this particular cellular component, so the drug is essentially inactive against humans. This was shown by doing tests on mice. There is the possibility that the drug may elicit allergic response in humans (penicillin often does), but this will be tested in clinical trials.
The more exciting part of the work that did not get any mention in the summaries is how they found the antibiotic. They developed an approach to grow on a large scale microorganisms that were previously impossible to culture in lab conditions. They capture the microorganisms on a chip and then put the chip back into the environment from which the samples was isolated. This means that they did not need to guess what kind of nutrients each microorganism will need (they tested ~10,000 different microbes). The approach allowed them to grow 50 fold more microorganisms compared to what was possible using the current state of the art. To me this is the big news, because antibiotic discovery has been limited by our ability to grow microorganisms in the lab.
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What about all the good bacteria in our body? Quite a lot of our bodily functions need bacteria to work properly.
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You're describing a well understood problem associated with a large number of commonly prescribed antibiotics. It appears you have failed to consider the fact that cessation of all bodily functions due to death from infection is a significantly worse outcome than complications resulting from suppression of beneficial bacteria.
(philip.paradis posting AC at the moment)
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What about all the good bacteria in our body? Quite a lot of our bodily functions need bacteria to work properly.
You will feel like shit when your good bacteria get nuked... but you do not die. You do die, however, with an untreated infection of MRSA, Bacillus anthracis, TMycobacterium tuberculosis, or even plain old Treponema pallidum (Syphilis) or Rickettsia (Typhus)
What was your point again?
Re:The hard part is yet to come (Score:4, Informative)
That's exactly what they're claiming. From TFA:
Moreover, these pathogens failed to develop resistance to the compound: There were no surviving individuals that had evolved to withstand its attack. (Resistance usually develops when a small percentage of microbes escape an antibiotic because of a mutation and then those bacteria multiply.) Lewis initially took this total devastation as a discouraging sign—the mark of “another boring detergent.” (Bleach, after all, is a strong antibiotic, but it’s a little too effective at killing any surrounding cells.) However, it turned out that the new compound, which the group named teixobactin, was not toxic to human cells in a dish.
Yes there haven't been human trials yet, but that's very promising.
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Finding things that kill bacteria is easy. Finding things that kill bacteria and do not significantly harm the host, now that is the hard part.
I think a much harder part is getting people to stop taking antibiotics for every stupid little illness under the sun. I know people that run to the doctor for a prescription when they get a bad cold.
Word to the wise for those "hooked" on taking anitbiotics so foolishly: "Grow up...and grow a pair while you are at it."
Now, if we can only control the unlimited introduction of antibiotics into our food supply through animal feeds. Yes, I know that is a "first world problem", but how much food produced in "fir
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Finding things that kill bacteria is easy. Finding things that kill bacteria and do not significantly harm the host, now that is the hard part.
The hardest part might be finding patients willing to spend a year dead and buried in some random field just to cure a case of jick itch.
Re: The hard part is yet to come (Score:1)
Humans require bacteria to survive.
If you wipe out all bacteria with no survivors that leads to a c. Diff like situation as your body tries to readjust.
Maybe you don't die from pneumonia or MERSA, but if you end up dying by painful dehydrating shits, that's not an improvement.
There's three treatments for c. Diff. More antibiotics, surgery, or poop transplant.
Misleading title (Score:5, Informative)
Even by Slashdot's own TL;DR: summary, the title of this is wrong. Its not the new antibiotic in 30+ years that's astonishing, its the technique used in the experiment because it allows scientists to get easier access to those microbes that wouldn't grow in a lab. That hurdle is now a thing of the past.
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the best way to treat an infection? (Score:1)
nuke it from orbit. it's the only way to be sure.
microbes that refuse to grow in labs. (Score:1)
I hate mirobes that refuse to grow in labs. I've had supposed urinary infections that wouldn't grow in the lab, I was surprised when my urologist told me I had many infections refuse to grow in the lab. Lucky, the antibiotics seamed to work!!
Labrador (Score:2)
I hate mirobes that refuse to grow in labs.
Was it a black lab [wikipedia.org]
Training... (Score:1)
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I heard a brief report on NPR a few minutes ago. Apparently, this antibiotic works by latching onto a part of the bacteria that cannot mutate. So far, it has cured, among other things, staph and tuberculosis in mice.
It should be noted that the really important part of this story, at the moment, is the new method developed to cultivate this bacteria that could not previously be lab-cultivated - 99% of all bacteria cannot be lab-cultivated at present.
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"Cannot mutate" is probably too strong a statement. "Tends not to mutate" would be more accurate. Plenty of bacteria have evolved multi-step resistance, it's just considerably harder. Bacteria have time. Lots of time.
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Re:Training... (Score:5, Informative)
If we keep taking natural antibiotics from nature, mass manufacture them, won't we just train the world's bacterial populations to be immune to practically anything we can throw at them?
You are making a very good point. Currently antibiotic resistance is a serious problem, mostly because we are very slow in discovering new antibiotics. What is very exciting about this research is that it significantly shifts the odds in our favor by allowing very large scale screens for new antibiotics. It will allow us to outpace the rate of resistance development. The probability that a particular infection will be resistant to multiple different antibiotics drops exponentially with the number of antibiotics you have. If you have a tool chest of 5-6 antibiotics sooner or later you will have pathogens that are resistant to a significant proportion of these antibiotics. Make the tool chest 10 times larger, and you will have a lot less to worry about.
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You are making a very good point. Currently antibiotic resistance is a serious problem, mostly because we are very slow in discovering new antibiotics. What is very exciting about this research is that it significantly shifts the odds in our favor by allowing very large scale screens for new antibiotics. It will allow us to outpace the rate of resistance development. The probability that a particular infection will be resistant to multiple different antibiotics drops exponentially with the number of antibiotics you have. If you have a tool chest of 5-6 antibiotics sooner or later you will have pathogens that are resistant to a significant proportion of these antibiotics. Make the tool chest 10 times larger, and you will have a lot less to worry about.
Not to mention: antibiotic resistance isn't free. The mutation generally costs something.
A heavily armored bacterium that can barely move or eat may be highly resistant, but not very infectious ...
Re:Training... (Score:5, Informative)
As others have suggested this disrupts a part of Gram (+) cell wall synthesis which is difficult for bacteria to alter. Most antibiotics disrupt the protein constituents of the wall. Mutate one gene and the protein changes so it's relatively "easy" for bacteria to develop resistance. This new drug binds lipid constituents of the wall which are produced in a long synthesis pathway rather than a 1 to 1 gene to protein synthesis. Bacteria would need to mutate multiple genes coding multiple parts of the pathway simultaneously and in a complementary way to alter the structure of the target lipid without completely disrupting the pathway. So it's a much "harder" (meaning less likely to happen frequently) mutation to achieve.
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Bacteria would need to mutate multiple genes coding multiple parts of the pathway simultaneously and in a complementary way to alter the structure of the target lipid without completely disrupting the pathway.
A trillion bacteria with a trillion typewriters will eventually write the complete works of antibiotic resistance.
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Each antibiotic resistance that a cell strain evolves is likely to include a burden that makes it harder for that strain to compete in the wild.
Develop an antibiotic. It works for a while, then bacteria evolve immunity to it. Stop using that antibiotic for 100 years, the bacteria lose immunity. Start using the antibiotic again
Lather, rinse, repeat.
I hope.
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What do you mean it ruined that drug? The company made a fortune with it! That's the whole point of making drugs, right? And now they (or some other company) can make a fortune with a new drug.
Dirt (Score:1)
A new compund? (Score:3)
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Antibiotic resistance (Score:2)
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I would be in favor of that, like most things that are bad for us, it makes someone money.
Lofty claims (Score:2)
Pomegranate (Score:2)
Is it Pomegranate? If not they should look at that took. Pomegranate may be literally perfect. It inhibits bad gut bacteria and promotes beneficial ones like Bifidobacterium
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm... [nih.gov]
Look at this chart, it is quite possibly the greatest modulator of gut bacteria ever http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm... [nih.gov]