Sugarcane Toxins May Actually Be The Key To A New Antibiotic

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The secret to good science is finding a threat and making this a weapon. It’s all about working with nature by going to the very crux of the problem. For some scientists, this journey has been quite disappointing, and for others, successful.

For farmers and botanists everywhere, there is a growing threat of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. This has been there for years now, but a new look at a plant pathogen saw a potential new method of combating the toxin.

The toxin has been detrimental to the sugarcane plant for years now, but they saw that this could be developed into an antibacterial agent that works wonders. The way the agent behaves is new to this type of medicine.

The agent is called albicidin. This belongs to a group of pathogens that causes a disease in sugarcane plants, and this is often referred to as leaf scald. However, it also seems that this is able to attack bacteria in a completely new fashion than common antibiotics such as fluoroquinolones.


A new study has been made and researchers are looking at the mechanism used by albicidin to attack lifeforms. They saw that it works as a DNA topoisomerase inhibitor.

Essentially, topoisomerases are nuclear enzymes that play a crucial part when it comes to DNA replication, transcription, chromosome segregation, and recombination. In the study that they made, albicidin was found to be effective when comes to locking the DNA gyrase in antibiotic-resistant E. coli, that is caused when the double-strand DNA breaks. When this happens, this leads to the slow cell death.

“We could not elicit any resistance towards albicidin in the laboratory,” said Dmitry Ghilarov. He is one of the researchers in a British-German-Polish group that looked into the potential antibiotic at the John Innes Center in Norwich, UK.

“That is why we are really excited—because we think it will be very hard for bacteria to evolve resistance against albicidin-derived antibiotics.”


Antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections are one of the biggest challenges in conventional medicine today. Far more dangerous in terms of case fatality and total fatality than COVID-19 has ever been, developing new methods of fighting these infections has nevertheless been a task largely ignored by major pharma companies.

“Now we have a structural understanding, we can create modifications of albicidin to improve its efficacy and pharmacological properties,” Ghilarov said.

“We believe this is one of the most exciting new antibiotic candidates in many years. It has extremely high effectiveness in small concentrations and is highly potent against pathogenic bacteria—even those resistant to the widely used antibiotics such as fluoroquinolones.”

The scientists also made sure to check for safety and efficacy of what could be a new antibiotic. They did this through animal infection models, which has already been established. The two derivatives of ablicidin have passed the test.

Furthermore, the researchers write in their study that inhibitors of DNA gyrase is an untapped reservoir of potential antibiotic compounds. What they need to do now is understand it better and expand the field outward. This could potentially find ways to turn new pages in the development of a brand new class of pharmaceuticals.

 

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