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

Hooray for Genome Research!

[roberto0]

This is a wonderful announcement, but as I can see from the lack of comments in this discussion, not an exciting one.

About 5 years ago, the unveiling of a newly sequenced bacterial genome was cause for great celebration. Today, there are over 40 species of bacteria whose genome has been completely sequenced. While the addition of one more "bug" might not be that exciting nowadays, one must realize that the compilation of this kind of information has far-reaching effects in the fields of medicine and biology.

For more info, check out The Institute for Genomic Research

Re:It certainly is an exciting one

[diaphanous]

(1) nobody seems to have noticed or mentioned here that DNA is not the only way of inheriting cellular information

This seems like a trivial statement, though underemphasized in the popular media. Any organelle or chemical that is passed from parent to progeny is "cellular information"

(2) we are still borrowing microbes to do the actual manufacturing, rather than doing it mechanically ourselves.

Microbes have had billions of years more than homo sapiens to "discover" and test new anti biotics, it would be remarkable if we had surpassed them in cleverness in the few centuries we've studied them. We have gotten better at somethings though; 16 years ago if you wanted to clone a gene, the typical way to do it was to insert it into the E. coli genome, wait for the bacteria to divide several times and harvest the dna. Now its often done using polymerase chain reaction (though this does still require using a DNA polymerase from a thermophile, so we can't quite declare independence from the rest of nature.)

--phillip