First New Antibiotic in 30 Years

Website URL: http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/resistance-proof-antibiotic-we-ve-been-waiting
Name: Roy Yoon
Author/Date of Article: Janet Fang, January 8, 2015
Article Summary:
             An international team of scientists led by Kim Lewis of Northeastern University, discovered an antibiotic from soil bacteria. The newly extracted antibiotic from this bacteria  can cause a vast amount of microbes, which can cause diseases to die. No resistance to these new antibiotics has yet been discovered.  Searching for antimicrobial products ,Lewis's team looked at 10,00 compounds which was isolated from the soil which was uncultured. These  compounds were seen as not fit to be cultured, as they could not grow in the experimental conditions of the petri dishes."So Lewis and colleagues developed what they call iChip, which sorts individual bacterial cells into single chambers, and after the device is buried in the ground, several molecules are allowed to diffuse into the iChip" (Fang). Basically, the bacteria "think" that they are living in more natural conditions, so that the bacteria can strive and form colonies. A compound called, teixobactin, causes the cell wall of bacteria to breakdown, and also prevents the synthesis, or forming of the bacterial cell wall. When tested on mice, the teixobactin showed to be deadly to strains of bacteria such as "Staphylococcus aureus, TB-causing Mycobacterium tuberculous, and Clostridium difficile, which causes inflammation of the colon" (Fang). As for concern for antibiotic resistance against the teixobactin, a similar strain of bacteria called vancomycin which functions in similar ways to the teixobactin, took over 30 years for antibiotic resistance to form against it. Lewis's team suggests that it may take even longer for antibiotic resistance to form against the teixobactin.

Article Relevance:
             We have learned about the ongoing issues of antibiotic resistance of bacteria and pesticide resistance of certain organisms. With bacteria evolving and changing constantly through the exchange of genetic material within the bacteria, common antibiotics no longer have effect on certain strains of bacteria and can bring simple infections to extremes. With bacteria using plasmids to share genes for antibiotic resistance, the constantly reproducing bacteria can share these antibiotic resistant  genes with other bacteria. But with Lewis's teams work, there is now a suggested hope that a new type of antibiotic may be effective against these bacteria.