A New Way to Discover Antibiotics

choi

Gautam Naik, Potent Antibiotic Discovered Using Novel Technique. Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2015.
www.wsj.com/articles/scientists- ... diseases-1420654892

Quote:

"About 80% of all antibiotics are derived from microbes [here meaning bacteria] or fungi in the environment [to 'kill or damage other bacteria' or fungi], while the rest are synthetic. But of the naturally occurring microbes, only 1% can be properly grown and cultured in a laboratory dish. As a result, scientists have been unable to tap the vast storehouse of 'uncultured' bacteria as a source of new antibiotics.

"After screening 10,000 strains this way, the researchers found * * * teixobactin * * * [tested on mice, but not on humans yet: ]The animals didn’t suffer any serious side effects. However, teixobactin didn’t turn out to be effective against most strains of certain organisms known as ‘Gram-negative bacteria,’ which can be especially hard to treat with many existing antibiotics.

"Teixobactin kills bacteria by binding on to multiple targets and by causing the cell walls to break down. According to the authors, this mechanism suggests that it could be many decades before any resistant strains emerge—a property that makes the compound especially promising.

My comment:
(a) I do not know why the online version (which WSJ released just 16 minutes ago; it's 3:20 PM, Jan 8) identifies itself as "Jan 9, 2014." The report appears in print Jan 8.
(b) View the graphic FIRST, before reading the text.

(c)  The report is based on

Lin LL et al, A New Antibiotic Kills Pathogens Without Detectable Resistance. Nature, _: _ (online publication, Jan 7, 2015).
www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature14098.html
(i)
(A) The principal investigator is Kim Lewis, University Distinguished Professor, Northeastern University (in Boston).
("PhD, Biochemistry, Moscow University, Moscow, USSR; BSc, Biology, Moscow University, Moscow, USSR")
(B) Kim Lewis, Persister Cells and the Paradox of Chronic Infections; Dormant persister cells are tolerant to antibiotics and are largely responsible for recalcitrance of chronic infections. Microbe (a magazine published by American Society for Microbiology), 5: 429-437 (2010)
www.perfendo.org/docs/Biofilm/persisters%20lewis.pdf
(a sidebar titled "Lewis: From Russia with Love, Particularly for Microbiology" a page 431: "Kim Lewis calls himself a 'garden-variety American,' born in New York, but raised in Moscow after his family moved there 'for idealistic reasons' when he was two. He attributes his happy childhood there to being 'shielded by the grown-ups from the unpleasant reality of the police state,' he says. 'I left Russia because I had to live free, which I do now.' Lewis, 57")
(ii) The authors name the antibiotic Teixobactin without explaining why. However,
(A) Portuguese English dictionary
teixo (noun masculine): "yew"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/teixo
(B) The Nature article does not say the bacteria or antibiotic has anything to do with yew.
(iii) They identify the "Gram-negative" bacteria ("An extract from a new species of β-proteobacteria provisionally named Eleftheria terrae showed good activity").