Discovery provides path to pathogen-targeted antibiotics

"Take with food" is a common warning for people who use antibiotics, but a discovery announced this week in the scientific journal Nature could pave the way for more targeted drugs.

This advice for taking antibiotics is necessary because current medications kill all types of bacteria, including the beneficial bacteria in our intestines that help us digest our food. When we take current antibiotics, it can cause digestive problems and even worse results.

Although we can consider bacteria as pathogenic microorganisms, there are about as many bacteria in your body as there are human cells. And almost all are useful - they are almost as essential to human survival as air, food and water. That is why a more selective antibiotic would be important.

Zhao-Qing Luo, Professor of Biology at Purdue University, and his team have discovered the mechanism by which the bacteria that cause Legionnaire's disease begin their invasion into host cells. This discovery itself paves the way for the treatment of this relatively rare disease, which affects less than 20,000 people per year in the United States.

But the implications of the discovery go far beyond those of the legionaries.

Luo and his colleagues have discovered that bacteria inject about 300 proteins into the host cell, allowing them to survive and replicate once inside the host.

Studies in the Luo laboratory had already shown that a single enzyme produced by a bacterium can neutralize cellular defences and accelerate infections. The new discovery shows that this enzyme is regulated by a single enzyme through a single mechanism.

"This is a new target for drug therapy to fight virulent bacteria," Luo said. "One of the common problems with current antibiotics is that they kill indiscriminately because they attack the central functionality of bacterial cells. This will disrupt the microbiome."

Instead, Luo said that a drug that would only attack this infection mechanism would not affect the good bacteria that live in our body.

Luo said that the injected protein molecule uses the ATP cell molecule in a unique way in its way of cleaving the energy molecule, which could provide an attractive mechanism for a drug target.

"Now that we have identified this protein necessary for infection, we can identify the compounds that interfere with its action and study them to see if they can be used as new drugs," he says.

• BCL0057

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  75 bioactive Compounds

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  Triterpenoids Compound Library

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  Steroids Compound Library

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  Sesquiterpenoids Compound Library

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  Quinones Compound Library

  33 bioactive Compounds

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  Phenylpropanoids Compound Library

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  Phenols Compound Library

  445 bioactive Compounds

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  Miscellaneous Compound Library

  304 bioactive Compounds

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  Lignans Compound Library

  206 bioactive Compounds

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  Iridoids Compound Library

  118 bioactive Compounds

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  Flavonoids Compound Library

  764 bioactive Compounds

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  477 bioactive Compounds

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  Coumarins Compound Library

  181 bioactive Compounds

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  Chalcones Compound Library

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  Cerebrosides Compound Library

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  Anthraquinones Compound Library

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  Alkaloids Compound Library

  1157 bioactive Compounds