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Sea Sponge Extract Conquers Resistant Bacteria
Science News has an article on research into a compound found in a particular kind of sea sponge that seems to have the ability to restore antibiotics' effectiveness against resistant bacteria. The hope is that, since the compound is not itself deadly or even harmful to bacteria, it may skew the antibiotic-bacteria arms race in our favor. "Chemical analyses of the sponge's chemical defense factory pointed to a compound called algeferin. Biofilms, communities of bacteria notoriously resistant to antibiotics, dissolved when treated with fragments of the algeferin molecule. And new biofilms did not form. So far, the algeferin offshoot has, in the lab, successfully treated bacteria that cause whooping cough, ear infections, septicemia and food poisoning. The compound also works on... [MRSA] infections, which wreak havoc in hospitals. 'We have yet to find one that doesn't work,' says [one of the researchers]."
I hope the researchers take care with this and treat it with respect.
The last thing we need is for golden staph to be in the presence of this algeferin outside the therapeutic window and modify itself accordingly. GS is bad enough already, the last thing we (humans) want is for it modify itself off some oceanic super goo.
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"Science News has an article on research into a compound found in a particular kind of sea sponge that seems to have the ability to restore antibiotics' effectiveness against resistant bacteria. The hope is that, since the compound is not itself deadly or even harmful to bacteria, it may skew the antibiotic-bacteria arms race in our favor. "
Good thing we're not destroying our environment so discoveries like this can continue to be made.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
'We have yet to find one that doesn't work,' says [one of the researchers]."
Oh, but when they do, then once again the vile bacteria will have the upper... psuedopod.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My hero!
What?
It's funny that phage medicine has been demostrated to be very effective to treat antibiotic resistant bacteria, yet it's never been adopted in western medicine. But something comes along that works in conjunction with anti biotics and it's hot stuff. Fucking pharmasutical companys.
Or the chickens and pigs.
Good medicine is only for responsible races. I wonder what we'd actually do with a second chance. If we blow it, I'd be tempted to just deliberately poison the water. Oh, wait. . .
-FL
It would be perfect against salmonella. Salmonella is extremely hazardous to public health, because it can reside dormant in the intestinal biofilm for practically indefinite periods (up to 25 years), and the carrier remains infectious all the time. A single bacterium can cause a potentially fatal illness, so in some jurisdictions, anyone who works with food is tested for salmonella. Unfortunately the only way to positively remove salmonella from a carrier is ciprofloxacin, an antibiotic generally considered an antibiotic of last resort. Its serious, potentially disabling side-effects include permanent damage of peripheral nerves, the intestine and spontaneous tendon rupture. A way to dissolve the bacteria from the biofilm would probably make them easier to eradicate with less dangerous antibiotics.
Now can we be a bit more careful with it this time? No attempts to coat the planet in a thin layer of the stuff, please. The loss of the best weapons against disease we've ever found is not a fair price to pay for cheaper meat. Hopefully we've learned that lesson, although every time I see a doctor prescribe antibiotics just to get someone out of their surgery, I despair a little.
Aa few years ago I sat outside the entry doors to an ICU where a relative was lying. I sat there for many days, and many hours.
I observed every single nurse stop and scrub at the scrub station which was located near the ICU entry doors. I observed maybe
one doctor out of thirty doctors scrub at the station. Most doctors walked right through the doors and did not scrub.
You can draw your own conclusions about this, but it seems obvious that things weren't being done in a consistent manner,
and I've been told by some European doctor buddies that this
sort of lax behavior in matters of sterile procedures is NOT tolerated in German hospitals.
So, magic bullets are great, but what we really need, in the US at least, is a change in the way the medical "profession" behaves. After what I saw with my own eyes, I can't say the conduct I observed was what I'd call professional, and it will be a cold day in hell before I allow myself to be admitted as a patient in the hospital at UNC-Chapel Hill.
The compound is called ageliferin.
I wonder if this stuff will dissolve dental biofilms. Would be cool to finally have a simple, 100% effective treatment that totally prevents plaque, gum disease, cavities... Tho I suppose if it's that good, the ADA will bury it.
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...
Found another life form to abuse for our own benefit. Aren't human beings just great?
you knew it was coming
Let me guess, to get more of it, we need to implant the sponges in little orphan girls?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Bacteria don't pave psuedopods - they lack the internal structure and size of eukaryotes like amoeba. What they do have are flagella and the type III secretory proteins they evolved from (think microscopic syringes).
T+10 years: government bodies approve sea-sponge-enhanced antibiotics for use on humans.
T+12 years: patients start telling their doctor: "My friend told me regular antibiotics don't work. I want sea-sponge antibiotics!
T+17 years: sea-sponge resistent bacteria start to emerge because of patients not completing their courses.
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
and myself included.I have suffered with 2 MRSA infections in the past year.
Hope they can get this to the public ASAP.
Geek Hillbilly
The subhead states "Bacteria treated with compound lose their resistance"
My question is what is treated?
If treated means "immersed in a strong bath of the compound for 2 weeks" then the compound may not be very practical. If treated means "a small dose included with the antibiotic" then the treatment is very practical.
The fact that the article was not very specific suggests its not the latter.
...they ARE sponges after all....
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
that it is not clear that intelligence is the best solution to the question as to how to best propagate life. We've spend generations understanding how bacteria help and harm us, and have created more and more intellectual defenses and offenses to protect us from their harmful effects. Nevertheless, their unintelligent brute force efforts have always bested our best efforts (or we have acted to undermine our own successes). We may think that we are the dominant form of life on this planet, but billions upon billions of microorganisms would beg to differ.
Ok, besides the mis-spelling of "ageliferin" (for those wondering why Google's not bringing up much)...
This is pretty big, but it's not coming out of nowhere. I'm not too familiar with this particular compound, but it appears to be a bio-film breaker -- most (but not all) of which work by disrupting quorum sensing. What's exciting about this particular example is both its potency and apparent non-toxicity.
If suitable for use in humans, you can expect this to dramatically improvement treatment of various types of infections involving biofilm-forming bacteria -- you find these a lot in Cystic Fibrosis patients, immunocompromised patients, and various infections of catheters and implanted items and such.
I was once killing time outside a chemist in a shopping centre. In doing so I started reading a pamphlet advertising a new probiotic, as I figured they might be useful to me. However, as it turned out, the pamphlet went to great lengths to explain that any competent doctor would (successfully) treat a person with the flu with antibiotics. The idea of ingesting live organisms from a company that fails high school biology has me pretty worried to say the least.
I hereby unpatent adding algefarin to toothpaste to reduce bacterial films in plaque and tartar. hah - take that.
meh
So, after the bacteria got a sponge bath, penicillin can kill them. Poor things. Taking a shower can be dangerous.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Whoa - This compound they are claiming all these properties for - algeferin - is apparently unknown to the Scientific Literature. What we are debating here is one poster at a regional conference by a graduate student, that shows a sponge extract inhibits a few types of bacteria in laboratory cultures.
So,
When the bacteria eventually develop a resistance to this, now we're going to wipe out an entire species of sponges?
I just love how we solve one technical problem by shooting ourselves in the foot in other arenas (environmental protection).
An unstated argument here is that people distributing medicine and those who don't take their full course are somehow at fault.
Erm, that's because it is their fault. Nothing unstated about it. When getting antibiotics, the vast majority of people get either the full course or nothing at all - there's no in-between. If you choose not to take the full course after receiving it, it's your fault.
Of course there are plenty of people who can't get the drugs at all - but that's not germane to this conversation as such people are not contributing to drug-resistant bacteria.
Does it really make moral sense that farm animals are over treated and people end up with half treatments?
It must be fun building up so many straw men. That's the only reason I can figure that you have for doing it so often.
Do you think that people really want to have less than proper medicine?
Yes. As is evidenced by the fact that so many people think that because the "feel fine now" they don't have to finish their course of meds.
'We have yet to find one that doesn't work,' says [one of the researchers]."
If it works on all bacteria, what are the chances our hundreds (or is it more than that) of 'good bacteria' don't get destroyed in the process ?
Is the effect of the ageliferin reversible ? Is there a potential for it to be made specific to one type of bacteria (which would mean we would need to culture the bacteria we want to destroy anyway) ?
And finally, are the answers to these questions in the article ? Just woke up, too early for me to read it...
why not just use it against anything and everything, it's not like it's going to evolve anyway, right?
w00t we can make plasmids now!
That's what nature has been doing forever (or for 6000 years, depending on your reliance on books). If you want to fight something that is always evolving, do it with something that evolves at least at the same rate.
As we humans are limited in our evolution rate by inconvenient things like life span, we have to fight bacteria with something similar like... hum... virus that kill bacteria and are already extensively used in Eastern Europe and Asia?
OK, so what are we going to do? Rape the sea for sponges? Or let the pharamceutical co's use more oil for the production of a compound that IS destined to fail? carvalhao sort of has the right idea, but I think using potentially harmlful virus to attack bacteria is the wrong way to go. He/She is right about the changing aspect of it though. But, why not have something that is different every year and yet is essentially the same? When MRSA started making headlines I did some searching to find out more. I came across a website that links to another with worldwide research. The first is "The Very Essence" (some links below to relevant articles) and it cites PubMed.gov (which collects medical research articles from around the world.) The thing that gets me is that BigPharma (not a big fan) finds things that work, finds a way to duplicate what they think is the KEY ingredient, manufacture it by manipulating the chemical structure of crude oil, and sell it for a fortune. Then they turn around and say that the natural remedies don't work! Anyway, I am starting to get my bile up so I will stop before I blow a blood vessel. http://aromatherapy4u.wordpress.com/2007/10/28/what-does-a-mrsa-skin-infection-look-like-and-what-can-we-do-to-prevent-the-spreading/ http://aromatherapy4u.wordpress.com/2007/11/27/strains-of-mrsa-and-making-scents-about-the-superbug/ http://aromatherapy4u.wordpress.com/2007/11/04/mrsa-whats-the-truth-and-what-should-we-do-to-protect-ourselves/ http://aromatherapy4u.wordpress.com/?s=mrsa
Let us know when you survive being totally immersed in it and having your body fluids become a significant percentage ethanol.
Irony: when someone flames a post and they, not the parent, are modded flamebait.
Do the mods even know what these words mean, or do they just see '-1' and hit a button?
I searched for the words "bromoageliferin" and "biofilm" on Google Scholar to see the distribution of articles by year.
1997, 1 article, Japan
2007, 1 article, US
2008, 6 articles, US
The anti-biofilm activity of this and other substances derived from sponges was discovered by Japanese researches. The application they were looking for was the prevention of biofouling in shipping, power stations cooling systems, etc.
In 2007, the use of bromoageliferin analogues against antibiotic resistant strains was tested in NCSU.
In 2008, a NOAA researcher rediscovered it, apparently independently.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Off shore drilling and mining have caused a beneficial sea sponge to go extinct.
Its not the years, its the mileage
When getting antibiotics, the vast majority of people get either the full course or nothing at all - there's no in-between.
You seem so sure of this, why? Are you friends with people in Brazil and India? Don't you think it a little strange that people don't finish taking medicine their doctor gave them? A more reasonable explanation for half taken medicine is half full wallets and other things you have no experience of. People can't afford to complete the course or have some awful thing happen that gets in the way. The developing world is where you more often see anti-biotic resistant bacteria emerging, not the first world where animal overuse is happening. Face it, IP laws are what's wrong with the picture.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Fine argumentative technique. Good day sir, I had a feeling I was wasting my time in the first place, but chose to give you the benefit of the doubt. No worries, it won't happen again.
but chose to give you the benefit of the doubt
You must be new here
Make SELinux enforcing again!
http://slashdot.org/~SockDisclosure/journal/214377
Sorry.