Wasp Antibiotic
The new antibiotic is derived from the venom of predatory wasps
Sergey Vasiliev, Naked Science
Antibiotics have become one of the most important discoveries in history, providing humanity with an incredibly effective weapon in the fight against bacterial infections. And it will be even more terrible to lose it because of various resistance genes that are increasingly spreading among microbes, including pathogens. This process has already led to the emergence of multi-resistant strains that are insensitive to the action of a whole range of different antibiotics, and forced scientists to seriously attend to the search for new antibacterial substances.
In this work, they turn both to computer modeling and to wildlife – it is enough to recall how two years ago antibiotics of a completely new type, malacidins, were found in ordinary soil microbes. Another natural reservoir of such substances are the poisons of reptiles, scorpions and insects. And indeed, it was on the basis of wasp venom that scientists from the University of Pennsylvania managed to design a new promising antimicrobial agent. It is described in an article published in the journal PNAS (Silva et al., Repurposing a peptide toxin from wasp venom into antiinfectives with dual antimicrobial and immunomodulatory properties).
Octavio Franco and his colleagues used the venom of predatory social wasps Vespula, isolating from it the toxic peptide mastoparan-L (mast-L). It is known that it exhibits good antimicrobial properties, but it is impossible to directly use mast-L for treatment: it is also dangerous for human cells. The main contribution to this cytotoxicity is made by a short fragment at the end of the amino acid chain of the peptide. Therefore, the authors modified it by replacing it with another one – a pentapeptide sequence characteristic of some antibacterial substances.
The scientists named the resulting chimeric molecule mastoparan-MO (mast-MO) and tested its effect on laboratory mice. The animals were infected with potentially lethal amounts of E.coli cells or multi-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, after which they were treated with mast-MO. The drug showed a good result: 80 percent of the mice that received it survived, and without noticeable side effects.
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