While experiments proved the idea worked, the researchers did not understand precisely why it worked. One key to that discovery was that some antibiotics could use specific membrane pores to penetrate the cell membranes of Gram-negative bacteria if chemists added a positively charged group, for example an amine, to them, Tajkhorshid said. Using this guidance, Hergenrother and his colleagues successfully converted antibiotics that worked only against Gram-positive bacteria into effective killers of Gram-negative microbes, which are much harder to treat. chemistry professor and current study co-author Paul Hergenrother reported in the journal Nature that his team had determined a set of chemical rules for antibiotic compounds that could pass through Gram-negative bacterial membranes. Most of these infections are attributable to Gram-negative bacteria, which have a hard outer cell membrane that many antibiotics fail to penetrate, Tajkhorshid said. as a result of untreatable bacterial infections, and the problem is even worse in other parts of the world.” “Tens of thousands of people die each year in the U.S.
students Nandan Haloi and Archit Kumar Vasan, and biochemistry research scientist Po-Chao Wen. “Antibiotic resistance is a major clinical problem now in the world,” said University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign biochemistry professor Emad Tajkhorshid, who led the study with biophysics Ph.D. In a study reported in the journal Chemical Science, researchers developed a new method to determine how antibiotics with specific chemical properties thread their way through tiny pores in the otherwise impenetrable cell envelopes of Gram-negative bacteria. Scientists have labored for decades to find antibiotics that work against Gram-negative bacteria, which cause some of the deadliest infections in hospital settings and are most likely to be resistant to treatment with existing antibiotics.
0 kommentar(er)
