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|| health & wellness | AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION
ria with a particular metabolism .
Second , animal and plant producers of antibiotic substances need to be sought in new places , the natural sources and unique geographical and ecological zones that they inhabit should be utilized more vigorously , and new technologies should be developed for obtaining and cultivating them .
These two ways are already being implemented . As an example of the first way , in a project headed by Sterling Professor of Molecular , Cellular , and Developmental Biology and Chemistry at Yale University and Nobel Prize winner in chemistry Sidney Altman , scientists are searching for artificial analogs of nucleic acids — more exactly , fragments of them — that easily penetrate a cell and enter into interaction with its DNA and RNA . Such fragments can be created for every specific pathogen by analyzing its genome .
As to the second way , Russians will remember the ancient folk practice of putting a frog in a jug of milk so the milk wouldn ’ t go sour ; researchers at Moscow State University have studied the science behind the folkway , and they have succeeded in extracting antimicrobial peptides from the skin of frogs . Scientists are attempting to apply this research to medical technology .
The areas of antimicrobial research that are currently drawing the most interest are in bacteriophages , or bacterial viruses , and peptides .
Phagotherapy isn ’ t medicine as we have traditionally understood it , but rather a service package that includes rapid diagnostics and the selection of the necessary means against a particular pathogen . At the Hirschfeld Memorial Institute in Wroclaw , Poland , bacterial viruses are used as personalized medical treatment , and with great success , even in cases of neglected suppurative infections .
Peptides are the smaller siblings of proteins : they consist of up to fifty amino acids , while proteins may have hundreds and thousands of them . In distinction from antibiotics , which , as a rule , act on a certain molecular target , peptides embed themselves in the cellular membrane of bacteria and form special structures there . The membrane finally collapses under the weight of the peptides , the invaders penetrate inside , and the cell itself is torn apart and dies . Moreover , peptides act rapidly , while the evolution of the membrane ’ s structure is a very disadvantageous and difficult process for bacteria . Under such conditions , the likelihood of bacteria developing resistance to peptides is minimal .
In these two areas , scientific studies are in full swing all over the world .
ARTI : I can make a reassuring comment here . In July of 2017 an article was published in the journal Nature about a new-generation antibiotic called teixobactin , “ grown ” by a team consisting of biologists from the United States , Germany , and Great Britain assembled by NovoBiotics Pharmaceuticals .
The biologists developed a device that can be lowered into the ground to let bacteria grow in an environment that is natural to them . The substances that these bacteria exuded during their life activities were subsequently tested on mice that had been infected with dangerous illnesses . One of these substances possessed pronounced antibiotic characteristics and proved to be effective against most gram-positive bacteria that were resistant to all other antibiotics . The substance that was found harms ferments so important to bacterial cell wall formation that changing any of them is fatal to the cell wall . Providing that this new antibiotic substance is used with great caution — only in those instances where other means are ineffective — bacteria will not be able to develop resistance to it for at least thirty or forty years .
The pharmaceutical company plans to put its new drug on the market within five years , so our generation will have at least one way to resist the threat of global epidemics caused by mutated bacteria .
ALPEON . COM