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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.
Finding things that kill bacteria is easy. Finding things that kill bacteria and do not significantly harm the host, now that is the hard part.
Even by Slashdot's own TL;DR: summary, the title of this is wrong. Its not the new antibiotic in 30+ years that's astonishing, its the technique used in the experiment because it allows scientists to get easier access to those microbes that wouldn't grow in a lab. That hurdle is now a thing of the past.
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!
And how many people were murdered over Piss Christ?
How many die in Africa from sexually transmitted disease that is preventable through prophylactic use of condoms?
Your mistake was assuming that the things that upset Muslims to irrational behavior and violence would also have a parallel in Christianity. Huge cultural difference between the people of those two religions, but both are harmful to society and quite insane.
If we keep taking natural antibiotics from nature, mass manufacture them, won't we just train the world's bacterial populations to be immune to practically anything we can throw at them?
You are making a very good point. Currently antibiotic resistance is a serious problem, mostly because we are very slow in discovering new antibiotics. What is very exciting about this research is that it significantly shifts the odds in our favor by allowing very large scale screens for new antibiotics. It will allow us to outpace the rate of resistance development. The probability that a particular infection will be resistant to multiple different antibiotics drops exponentially with the number of antibiotics you have. If you have a tool chest of 5-6 antibiotics sooner or later you will have pathogens that are resistant to a significant proportion of these antibiotics. Make the tool chest 10 times larger, and you will have a lot less to worry about.
As others have suggested this disrupts a part of Gram (+) cell wall synthesis which is difficult for bacteria to alter. Most antibiotics disrupt the protein constituents of the wall. Mutate one gene and the protein changes so it's relatively "easy" for bacteria to develop resistance. This new drug binds lipid constituents of the wall which are produced in a long synthesis pathway rather than a 1 to 1 gene to protein synthesis. Bacteria would need to mutate multiple genes coding multiple parts of the pathway simultaneously and in a complementary way to alter the structure of the target lipid without completely disrupting the pathway. So it's a much "harder" (meaning less likely to happen frequently) mutation to achieve.
Pathetic loser attempts to use events of a thousand fucking years ago to justify and excuse Islam-inspired mass murder just a few hours ago.
Dude, you have a Thalidomide brain.
Well then, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks.
5% of the general population are sociopaths; 1% are psychopaths. So in any sufficiently large group you you will find plenty of individuals acting in deplorable ways -- even horrifically deplorable. Christians, Muslims, rural Southerners, lesbian golfers, people who like avocados -- any group is bound to have it's share of monsters.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Researchers in Boston found a substance that can destroy living things without any possible defense. The rest of us call it the Charles River.