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

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

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.