Researchers synthesized some penicillin breakdown products themselves for use in the experiments.TERENCE CROFTSome bacteria take antibiotic resistance a step further: they chow down on the very compounds designed to kill microbes and use them as fuel. Researchers detail today (April 30) in Nature Chemical Biology how some bacteria accomplish this feat, including the genes and enzymes involved in digesting penicillin. They hope the knowledge will eventually be put to work in applications such as breaking down antibiotics in, for example, hospital waste or farm runoff, and constructing novel drug compounds.
“Basically, if you look for it it’s there in when it comes to bacterial degradation of compounds. . . . Somebody out there will degrade just about everything,” says Jo Handelsman, a microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I don’t think that penicillin-producing strains of Penicillium are absolutely ubiquitous in soil, so it is kind of interesting that it is easy to find these degraders, even though they may not individually have encountered penicillin before.”
Guatam Dantas, a microbiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, stumbled across the phenomenon of antibiotic-eating bacteria during an earlier study looking for bacteria that can break down toxins, he explains. In that study, his group chose some antibiotics as controls to measure microbes’ responses to compounds they couldn’t eat—or ...
