For anyone interested in Microbiology. It's a pretty big deal, because not only is it a creative and smart way of tackling antibiotic resistance, but it brings a new hope for preventing the impending antibiotic crisis of 2050, which changes healthcare treatments.
Antibiotics are typically created through semisynthesis, which is a process where you take a natural substance and chemically tweak it using cultured bacteria. This is limiting because the bacteria cultured develop mutational resistances, and microbiology isn't expanding in the field of taxonomy these days to experiment with new cultured bacteria.
If you use culture-independent methods to analyze a gram of soil, you obtain an average of about 12,000 16s rRNA gene sequences, which means that a gram of soil typically ranges between 10,000-20,000 different microbes living in it. If you compare that to the over mere 8,500 microbes currently classified, we have a diverse microbial world that potentially inhabits millions of microbial species yet undiscovered. By using methods that extract antibacterial substances from uncultured bacteria, you increase the chances of finding new powerful antibiotics by a limitless amount, which lead to these incredible antibiotics like teixobactin that haven't yet created any antibacterial resistances.
Article by ScienceDaily here.
Original published study on the journal Nature here.
Reference: Nature 517, 455–459 (22 January 2015) doi:10.1038/nature14098
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