A Sweet Dose of Antibiotics

Scientists are using synthetic sugar in their quest for the answer to drug-resistant bacteria. A team of scientists from The University of Queensland and Queensland biotechnology company Alchemia have discovered a potential new class of antibiotics inspired by sugar molecules produced by bacteria.
Professor Matt Cooper and Dr Johannes Zuegg from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB) in partnership with Alchemia, published their research in the scientific journal Nature Communications.
They examined versions of modified sugar molecules to find those that will kill bacteria and are non-toxic to human cells.
“Bacteria have cell walls similar to the walls of a brick house, except instead of mortar the walls are held together by sugar polymers,” Professor Cooper said.
“But if you add one of our modified sugar molecules, they stop the linking process, destroying the cell wall and killing the bacteria.”
“The cell wall has been a target for antibiotics such as penicillin and vancomycin before, but the difference here is that we are stopping a centrally important part of the cell wall linking process.”
“Most molecules screened to become drugs have a flat, planar shape, whereas these molecules are three dimensional,” Dr Zuegg said.
“This means we can build on the sugar core in a variety of ways to make thousands of different combinations in three dimensional space."
[caption id="attachment_13366" align="aligncenter" width="398"] Synthetic Sugar Antibiotic Molecule[/caption]