A Tool for Fighting Superbugs Has Been Found Deep in the Desert

There are many more antibiotics that could be used. It can be difficult to get enough antibiotics for analysis if you find a promising one.

Laura Piddock is the scientific director of the Global Antibiotic R&D Partnership. Sometimes a bacterium can produce useful substances, but the genetic machinery is turned off so no antibiotics are made.

Dyson and his team decided to take the desert bacterium and add it to Streptomycesbacteria that already make antibiotics. The team believed that the genes from the fast-growing bacterium would increase the production of antibiotics in otherbacteria. Around half the time it takes conventional Streptomyces species, the modifiedbacteria produced antibiotic compounds.

The findings could be useful in the search for new treatments. If scientists find a new bacterium that can be used as a medicine, but doesn't produce a lot of it, there's a way to make it more productive. Dyson believes that this is a very simple strategy to use in a new antibiotic discovery program.

Piddock concurs. She says that gettingbacteria to produce greater volumes of antibiotic substances will be of interest to researchers in this field. They should be able to find new antibiotics that could be used to treat infections.

According to the World Bank, antimicrobial resistance is one of the top threats to global health, food security, and development. 10 million people could die from drug-resistant diseases by the year 2050 if no action is taken to fight superbugs. Drug resistance has risen as a result of the increased use of antibiotics during the Pandemic.

When antibiotics are exposed to more and more, resistance occurs. When humans take antibiotics for viral illnesses and when healthy livestock are given them for disease prevention, the phenomenon is worsened and accelerated.

Hatim Sati of the Antimicrobial Resistance Division at the World Health Organization says that it is impossible to completely stop AMR as it is a natural phenomenon.

One species that could help is Dyson's desert bacterium, but there are plenty of others that could also help. Some of the most inhospitable places on the planet include submarine volcanoes, deep-sea sponges, and the sands of the driest place on the planet. These habitats have a wide range of temperatures, pressures, and pressures.