Microbe Found In Grassy Field Contains Powerful Antibiotic

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.

Comments

Just in time

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:The hard part is yet to come

[ChrisMaple]

It will take years to actually even start to identify the damage this new antibiotic may have on the body.

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!