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from the like-throwing-stars-but-smaller dept.
Tiny, star-shaped molecules are effective at killing bacteria that can no longer be killed by current antibiotics, new research shows.
The study, published today in Nature Microbiology, holds promise for a new treatment method against antibiotic-resistant bacteria (commonly known as superbugs).
The star-shaped structures, are short chains of proteins called 'peptide polymers', and were created by a team from the Melbourne School of Engineering.
...
tests undertaken on red blood cells showed that the star-shaped polymer dosage rate would need to be increased by a factor of greater than 100 to become toxic. The star-shaped peptide polymer is also effective in killing superbugs when tested in animal models.Furthermore, superbugs showed no signs of resistance against these peptide polymers. The team discovered that their star-shaped peptide polymers can kill bacteria with multiple pathways, unlike most antibiotics which kill with a single pathway.
Let's hope any such molecules are thoroughly vetted with long-term studies before being introduced to medical therapies.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Wednesday September 14 2016, @02:43AM
Anyone have any idea what the active lifespan for these molecules is? Are they destroyed in the process of killing the bacteria? By the human metabolism? Environmental exposure after excretion (UV? chemical?)?
These sound like they're taking a very different approach to previous antibiotics, and if they don't rapidly break down then I don't care if these things are the miracle drug that ends all bacterial disease for all time, they could be far too dangerous to use on public-health scales. Bacteria are the foundation upon which our ecology is built - wipe them out, and the rest of life on Earth isn't far behind.
Such fears are probably unjustified, and one would hope that such things would be considered before being deployed on a large scale - but I have little faith in the current system to do so. The inventors are likely to be far too blinded by their success, and the regulatory bureaucracy only concerned with efficacy and immediate risk to human life.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @03:01AM
Bacteria are the foundation upon which our ecology is built - wipe them out, and the rest of life on Earth isn't far behind.
And nothing of value would be lost.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @01:08PM
Cheese... cheese will be lost.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday September 14 2016, @10:00AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday September 14 2016, @03:03PM
That's... not how evolution works. Yes, there's probably bacteria out there somewhere that have the genes to resist most naturally occuring antibiotics, but it's fairly rare that those genes get into disease-causing bacteria through horizontal gene transfer (i.e. the resistant bacteria giving their genes to the unrelated disease-causing bacteria). Evidence is strong that the resistance in can arise through spontaneous mutations over relatively short time-frames - one of the benefits of belonging to a species that can go through a dozen generations per day.
Put that in perspective: in one year bacteria can evolve as much as humans do in 87,600 years (assuming an average 20 yeas per human generation). And if a single bacteria survives exposure to an antibiotic, a day later it can have 4096 descendants. Consider that next time you use one of those antibacterial soap that "kills out 99.98% of germs" - by the same time tomorrow you may have just as many bacteria as you started with, but now they'll be descended from the ones that managed to survive the first exposure. Bet you you don't manage to kill 99.98% of them a second time...
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday September 14 2016, @06:12PM
Sorry, but a lot of bacterial evolution *does* work that way. And even some non-bacterial evolution, though not much.
Bacteria share genes rather freely, and they don't respect species boundaries. And occasionally you get something really weird because of that. Did you know that pea plants secrete hemoglobin in their rootlets? Hemoglobin is such a unique molecule that the only reasonable way for it to have gotten to pea plants is if a bacterium (or virus) picked it up from a chordate (I'm not a biochemist, so I don't know which branch of chordata would be involved, but it could probably be narrowed down quite a bit, possibly as much as "some ancestor of modern canines".), and then infected a pea plant ancestor and embedded the genes it had borrowed into the hereditary line. Now *THAT'S* unusual. But bacteria share genes among themselves all the time. So the grandparent's argument is valid, if not the only possibility.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday September 15 2016, @03:32AM
No argument that it can happen that way, but it doesn't exactly take a long time for it to happen through more traditional mutation-based evolution either.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday September 15 2016, @06:45PM
No argument that it can happen that way, but it doesn't exactly take a long time for it to happen through more traditional mutation-based evolution either.
That's probably true, but given how pervasive the genetic exchange is, it's not clear how to estimate time to adapt to a feature that nothing has previously encountered. My guess would be the same as yours (not long), but my certainty would be a lot lower.
That said, it didn't take long before SOME bug figured out how to eat polystyrene. But nothing yet has figured out how to make a living doing it (probably because of the lack of water). So it's not clear how long it will be before something evolves to eat these things. It's possible that there's no easy way from here to there. Basalt has proven relatively immune to bacteriological degradation for millennia.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.