 Drug Discovery news
Bacteria synthesize antibiotics to kill competitors; in fact, 70% of all antibiotics come from (or are inspired by) chemicals made by bacteria. Often, though, these bacterial secondary metabolite assembly lines have gone silent and are evident only in genome sequences, thus hiding potentially valuable new antibiotic compounds. Although cloning entire metabolic pathways into new hosts is possible, researchers don’t have many well developed tools available to facilitate such undertakings. Now researchers from the University of York have developed a combinatorial biosynthetic approach for mining silent metabolic pathways and potentially creating libraries of new antibiotic compounds. Find out… |