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Bioprospectors mine microbial genomes for antibiotic gold
But turning what they find into drugs isn’t so easy
Both these compounds, which use never-before-seen antimicrobial mechanisms, were found using techniques that let researchers look deep into the chemical diversity of microbes—much deeper than a typical antibiotic or antifungal screen might go. Gerry Wright, a biochemist at McMaster University who led the research group that discovered lariocidin, likens the hunt for antimicrobials to the gold mining operations in his native Ontario, Canada. James J. Collins, a synthetic biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been working on developing AI tools to computationally predict new compounds that have antibiotic activity.
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