Nearly a century ago, the discovery of penicillin — the first naturally-occurring bacteria-killer — spurred the creation of an entirely new class of medicines: antibiotics.
Armed with these drugs, doctors finally had a way to combat the bacterial infections that were the top cause of death at the time. But decades of overuse have had a deadly side effect: some bacteria have evolved to resist once-effective antibiotics, a problem dubbed “antibiotic resistance”.
Now, a University of Göttingen-led research team has a new lead in the hunt for effective weapons against these superbugs: antivitamins.
As the name suggests, antivitamins are substances that interfere with the function of vitamins. Researchers at Göttingen knew that some bacteria produce an antivitamin for vitamin B1, which kills off other bacteria in their environment, essentially wiping out their competition. However, they didn’t know exactly how the antivitamin did this, and that’s the question they sought to answer with their new study, published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.
Because the B1 antivitamin is nearly identical to the vitamin itself — it has just one extra atom — the researchers decided to focus on that atom. When they exposed drug-resistant E. coli to the B1 antivitamin, they found that the extra atom interfered with the function of one protein in the bacteria’s metabolic processes.
“Just one extra atom in the antivitamin acts like a grain of sand in a complex gear system by blocking its finely tuned mechanics,” researcher Kai Tittmann said in a press release.
They then used computer simulations to model how the antivitamin would affect humans and determined that our proteins either wouldn’t bind to it or wouldn’t be “poisoned” by it. Based on this new research, the Göttingen team believes the B1 antivitamin holds promise as the basis for a new antibiotic.
Antibiotic resistance is no joke for humanity, so we’ll be keeping an eye out on the development of antivitamins.
The post Could “antivitamins” be the cure to antibiotic resistance? first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.
Nearly a century ago, the discovery of penicillin — the first naturally-occurring bacteria-killer — spurred the creation of an entirely new class of medicines: antibiotics. Armed with these drugs, doctors finally had a way to combat the bacterial infections that were the top cause of death at the time. But decades of overuse have had a
The post Could “antivitamins” be the cure to antibiotic resistance? first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.