And there are undoubtedly many more bacteria out there that could give us useful new antibiotics to use. But if you find what appears to be a promising one, the next step is to coax it into generating sufficient quantities of antibiotics for analysis—and this can be a real challenge.
Antibiotic discovery is “often hindered by low yield,” says Laura Piddock, scientific director of the Global Antibiotic R&D Partnership (GARDP) in Geneva. Plus, sometimes a bacterium will have the potential to produce useful substances, but “the genetic machinery is turned off, so no antibiotic is made,” Piddock adds.
Knowing this, Dyson and his collaborators decided to take the tRNA gene from
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