Nature's Antibiotic Factory

Vancouverite writes "The genome of Streptomyces coelicolor is unveiled and published in Nature. It and its relatives produce two-thirds of the natural antibiotics in use, including tetracycline and erythromycin, plus other pharmaceuticals such as anticancer agents and immunosuppresssants."

Comments

messing around with drug resistant bugs

[hij]

From the article it sounds like this bug produces toxins that kill other bugs so that it has an advantage. This implies that this bug is itself resistant to many of the anti-biotics derived from it. I certainly think that good things could come out of this, but it does sound a bit precarious to mess around with a bug that could easily be resistant to some of our most effective drug treatments.

Re:messing around with drug resistant bugs

[skilef]

but it does sound a bit precarious to mess around with a bug that could easily be resistant to some of our most effective drug treatments

This bug is not the only one resistant to these antibiotics: most antibiotics are far more effective on one specific subclass of bacteria and leave other bacterial cells intact. The subclass depends in almost all cases on morphological differences that can be seen by staining or directly with a microscope. Penicillin for example is far more effective to Gram-positive bacteria than Gram-negative bacteria. The difference between those two is that Gram-positive bacteria have far more peptidoglycan (the substance Penicillin reacts with) in its membrane than Gram-negative. Therefore only classes of bacteria with a threedimensional network of peptidoglycan in their membrane are targeted with penicillin.. It's not like this bug described above is more dangerous because it's not affected by its own secreted antibiotic.