Marine bacteria offer hope for new antibiotics

About three-quarters of all antibiotics in clinical practice are produced by natural bacteriaThe antibiotics available today are losing their effects, and more and more pathogens are becoming resistant to them, and new antibiotics are urgently needed to develop themHowever, less than 1% of known bacteria are currently available for drug candidates, and the remaining 99% are considered unexploredthe ability to produce antibiotics is unevenly distributed among bacteriaFirst, it can be found in microbes with complex lifestyles, cell biology and large genomes, says Christian Jogler, a microbiologist at the University of JenaThese organisms produce antibiotic compounds and use them in nutrition and habitats to fight other bacteriatargeted cultivation of potential antibiotic-producing bacteria is exactly what Professor Jogler and his team didThey searched 10 locations in the sea for so-called plankton through divers and robotics"We know that plankton live in communities with other microbes and compete with them for habitat and nutrients," Chopler said"From samples from the Mediterranean, North Sea, Baltic, Black Sea, Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic Oceans, they found 79 new plankton, which together constitute 31 new genus and 65 new speciesto characterize newly acquired pure cultures, the researchers used bioinformatics and microscopyBioinformatics analysis is comprehensive and a measure of the complexity of microbial lifestyles and is therefore another indicator of antibiotic production, said DrWigan, who was involved in the studyThe results of these analyses suggest that newly discovered marine plankton have an unusually complex lifestyle and the potential to produce new antibioticssome bioinformatics analysis has been confirmed by researchersFor example, they studied the cell biology of isolated plankton"Their split is completely different from all the key pathogens, " says Professor Jogler "This work also shows a new mechanism for bacterial cell division Most importantly, however, the study shows that even so-called "uncultivatable" bacteria can be obtained and identified in pure cultures.