Nature: New antibiotics can effectively kill drug-resistant bacteria

November 23, 2019 / BIOON / -- more and more bacterial pathogens of infectious diseases are resistant to conventional antibiotics Among them, some typical hospital specific bacteria, such as Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae, have become resistant to most antibiotics currently available, and in some cases even to all antibiotics In terms of mechanism, the outer membrane of these resistant bacteria makes it difficult to be attacked Recently, scientists from JLU have discovered a new peptide that can attack Gram-negative bacteria through previously unknown targets In this study, researchers used the screening methods commonly used in natural product research, and successfully isolated a peptide named "darobactin" (image source: www Pixabay Com) darobactin is composed of seven amino acids, whose structural characteristics show that these amino acids are connected through a rare closed-loop After testing, the researchers confirmed that the substance was not cytotoxic, which is also a prerequisite for any molecule to be used as an antibiotic The author, Professor Sch ä Berle, said: "at present, we have been able to understand how bacteria synthesize this molecule We are engaged in natural products research at JLU Institute of insect biotechnology to increase the production of this substance and try to produce substances with similar structures " In addition, the researchers identified the site of action of darobactin They found that darobactin binds to the Bama protein in the outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria Finally, the outer membrane structure was destroyed and bacteria died Darobactin showed excellent results in the infection of wild-type and antibiotic resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae Therefore, darobactin provides a promising precursor for the development of new antibiotics In this paper, the author analyzes the characteristics of, Nils Böhringer, Zerlina G Wuisan, Hundeep Kaur, Runrun Wu, Andre Mateus, Athanasios Typas, Mikhail M Savitski, Josh L Espinoza, Aubrie O’Rourke, Karen E Nelson, Sebastian Hiller, Nicholas Noinaj, Till F Schäberle, Anthony D’Onofrio, Kim Lewis A new antibiotic selectively kills Gram-negative pathogens Nature, 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1791-1