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New bacteria, and two potential antibiotics, discovered in soil
Most bacteria cannot be cultured in the lab—and that’s been bad news for medicine. Many of our frontline antibiotics originated from microbes, yet as antibiotic resistance spreads and drug pipelines run dry, the soil beneath our feet has a vast hidden reservoir of untapped lifesaving compounds. Now, researchers have developed a way to access this […]
To find bioactive molecules with the potential to become new drugs less prone to antibiotic resistance, the researchers sequenced bacterial DNA extracted from soils from Rockefeller’s field center in upstate New York. Brady describes the method, which is scalable and can be adapted to virtually any metagenomic space beyond soil, as a three-step strategy that could kick off a new era of microbiology: “Isolate big DNA, sequence it, and computationally convert it into something useful.” “Studying culturable bacteria led to advances that helped shape the modern world and finally seeing and accessing the uncultured majority will drive a new generation of discovery.”
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