NIN Web Desk : Dr subhrojyoti chattopadhyay; The rise of antimicrobial-resistant pathogens has spurred scientists to search far and wide for new drugs. While many antimicrobial molecules have been discovered in recent years, it’s rare to find antimicrobials that have entirely new modes of action. Now, scientists have discovered a new antibiotic a lasso peptide called lariocidin which has a distinct mode of action that makes it the first of an entirely new class of antibiotic compound.
Gerry Wright, a biochemist at McMaster University who led the research, says Lariocidin was found in a bacteria called Paenibacillus that was “cultivated from a soil sample that we obtained here in Hamilton from my technician’s backyard.” He said that to find new drugs to combat growing antimicrobial resistance, scientists must look to more unusual or overlooked sources of antibiotics. Therefore the team grew the bacteria found in that soil sample for an entire year to let rarer, slower-growing bacteria increase before fractionating the bacteria to look for antimicrobial compounds. That process led to the group discovering a lasso peptide that exhibited broad-spectrum antibiotic activity and was effective at killing both gram-positive and gram-negative pathogenic bacteria, along with mycobacteria related to those that cause tuberculosis.
The molecule has a unique structure of a “knotted lasso or a pretzel.” “Lariocidin binds to the molecular machine, the ribosome, that makes all the cellular proteins, which is one of the most vital processes in the cells,” the researchers said. It binds to a specific site in the ribosome to which none of the known antibiotics bind, and stops the ribosome from making proteins. Another key benefit of lariocidin is that it’s not toxic to human cells, the researchers noted.
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