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Bacteria discovery could yield antibiotics
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BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Johns Hopkins researchers discovered a new weakness in bacteria that could yield an entirely new class of antibiotics — the next generation’s penicillin.
The sweet spot is a structure called a Z ring, like a cinch strap that forms around the bacterium’s waist during cell division and pinches it into two daughter cells, said Alex Dajkovic and Denis Wirtz, who published their findings recently in the journal Current Biology.
“They’re present in all bacteria that cause human disease and in 95 percent of all bacteria that exist on the planet,” said Dajkovic, a Hopkins researcher now working at Institut Curie in Paris.
“This is extremely important, because antibiotic resistance is on the rise, and many preventable deaths, especially in the developing world, are caused by bacterial infections.”
The finding offers hope for a new class of antibiotics, he said. When the cell’s DNA comes to the end of its life cycle and decides to terminate the germ, it targets the Z ring for destruction from within.
The ring can be disabled by another protein found in E. coli and other bacteria, according to their research.
By mimicking this protein, pharmaceutical companies may find a way to fight infections that no longer respond to older medications.
Most antibiotics target the ability of bacteria to build their cell walls or make proteins or DNA they need to reproduce or function, said Wirtz, another Hopkins researcher.
Scientists have known about the Z ring for 20 years, but not its connection to reproduction.
Current research in pharmaceuticals has focused mainly on creating slightly different versions of existing antibiotics, trying to work around bacteria’s ability to resist the drugs used to kill them, Dajkovic said.
Called one of the world’s most pressing public health problems by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of bacteria resistant to antibiotics has increased in the last decade.
Nearly all significant bacterial infections in the world are becoming resistant to the most commonly prescribed antibiotic treatments.
khille@baltimoreexaminer.com
