Lasso them microdogies

My correspondent G continues to scour through the interwebs looking for Blobocopy. I tell 'er she should start 'er own effin' blog but she's too busy scouring the interwebs. She did though submit The Blob's one-and-only guest blog [cw: asthma] in 2019. The latest alert concerned the discovery of a novel source of potent antibiotics in a Canadian soil sample. This happens occasionally as in the discovery of Eleftheria terrae ten years ago or more to the point discovery of Teixobactin - a chemical from that novel microbe that kills pathogens like MRSA. Back in my 2015 report, I bet that Teixobactin would give its discoverers a Nobel gong within ten years. But they haven't even got a production schedule sorted [there are technical hurdles] let alone FDA approval. Science is Hard.

Gerry Wright [L,L] has been on this line of research for at least ten years but Manoj Jangra [L.R] only came to the lab as a post-doc a tuthree years ago. He is holding [yea! 3-D printers!] a model of their novel antibiotic. If you squint, the molecule looks like a lasso = lariat hence "lariocidin". Their discovery is important because lariocidin nobbles other bacteria in a novel way - by interfering with the bacterial ribosome and preventing protein synthesis. 

When bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, researchers tend to modify [add a bell, drop a whistle] the antibiotic chemically, so that the bacteria no longer recognise the cause of their own demise. But that tends to buy only a few years until the bacteria develop their own modification in the arms-race. It is hoped that, by presenting a completely new method of attack, the effective life of lariocidin (and its inevitable derivatives) will be longer. And lariocidin's structure is radically different from existing antibiotics, so that will pose an extra challenge for the target pathogens. On the safety-side, bacterial ribosomes are functionally equivalent [make proteins] but structurally different from mammalian ribosomes; so there is not going to be cross-toxicity to both pathogen and patient.

Seems that the soil sample from which the lariocidin-producing Paenibacillus was isolated came from the garden of one of the lab techs in Wright's lab at McMasters U. But that's the easy bit, it only needs a trowel. I assured G that her garden was full of bacteria killing each other but even the a silver plated trowel isn't going to get her a Nobel. Wright sensibly enlisted the help of a team from University of Illinois Chicago UIC, who provided complementary expertise.

Wright seems to have a thing about Paenibacillus: in 2016 he was scrabbling about in the bowels of the New Mexico earth to find an ecosystem uncontaminated by humans. There they uncovered Paenibacillus sp LC321whose genome held a number of potential target antibiotics. One of the nice threads in that tale is that Wright heard about these New Mexico caves by going to a lecture by Hazel Barton, an Akron U spelunking microbiologist.  Note to self: always go to lunchtime seminars! Like me at Aled Edwards' giving side-eye to same-old same-old research funding.

Microdogies? It's a Rawhide reference. Dogie: an orphan calf.