The spread of drug-resistant “superbugs” — including bacteria that have evolved to thwart even the most potent antibiotics — represents an ever-growing threat to public health. Now, scientists have invented a new type of antibiotic that can take down these germs by rapidly rearranging its atoms and thus changing its shape.
The researchers described the first of these shape-shifting antibiotics in a paper published April 3 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. So far, they’ve tested the shape-shifter in wax moth (Galleria mellonella) larvae, a common animal model used to test antibiotics’ effectiveness, but they’ve yet to give the drug to humans or other mammals.
To make the new antibiotic, the researchers used “click chemistry” — highly efficient chemical reactions that can quickly and reliably “click” different chemical building blocks together, like the two halves of a seat-belt buckle. The study’s senior author, John Moses, a professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in New York, studied these ultrafast reactions under the guidance of K. Barry Sharpless, who earned one of his two Nobel Prizes for his role in the development of click chemistry.
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