Antibiotic Discovery in the Abyss
Combining the innovations of synthetic biology with robotic environmental sampling, a team of University of Bristol researchers are travelling to some of the most 'extreme' environments on Earth, including Atlantic depths of 4.5km, to find new leads which could help in the global fight against antimicrobial resistance. The development of antibiotics is considered by many to be the greatest medical advancement in human history. Recently, however, the emergence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as a global threat to our health and wellbeing has brought into sharp focus the pressing need for the discovery and development of new antibiotics capable of overcoming the impending threat of AMR. Historically, the majority of clinically useful antibiotics have been based on molecules isolated from natural sources. Even today around 70 per cent of all the antibiotics that are prescribed are derived from so-called 'natural products'; chemical compounds that are produced by microorganisms or plants to enable their survival in the environmental niches that they inhabit. Although natural product drug discovery was a mainstay of the pharmaceutical industry in the mid 20th century, the advent of structure-based approaches and combinatorial chemistry in the 1980s and 90s, led to industry migrating away from this approach. Now, some 20 years later, the emerging science of synthetic biology is enabling researchers to rapidly discover and optimise natural products for use as antibiotic leads, resulting in a renascence in this important area of research.
