New compound found effective against resistant microbes.
Most of the pharmaceutical weapons are now useless against these MRSA strains. According to estimates, as many as every second patient in the US treated by intensive-care medicine comes down with an MRSA infection. Plectasin could shift the balance of power back in the doctors' favour. But how exactly does the little protein molecule do that? University of Bonn (UB) researchers in Tanja Schneider and Hans-Georg Sahl's team have answered these questions together with Danish and Dutch colleagues. Plectasin disrupts the forming of the cell wall in bacteria so that the pathogens can no longer divide. In this process, plectasin behaves like a thief which steals the stones off a mason. 'It binds to a cell-wall building block called lipid II and thus prevents it from being incorporated,' Sahl, a professor, explains. 'However, a bacteria cannot live without a cell wall,' he said. It comes as no surprise that the most famous antibiotic penicillin also inhibits cell-wall synthesis. Yet, plectasin is more similar in its mode of action to another widely used drug, vancomycin.
