Yogurt bacteria defeat drug-resistant

Lactobacilli from yogurt inhibit the growth of more than a dozen infectious microbes with antibiotic resistance

Kirill Stasevich, "Science and Life", based on the materials of The Scientist: Microbe from Yogurt Impedes Drug-Resistant Bacteria

One of the biggest problems in modern medicine is the growing resistance of bacteria to a variety of antibiotics: they have been used for so long and so generously that microbes, thanks to their ability to evolve very quickly, have managed to adapt to them. 

And now researchers have to look for more and more new substances that could destroy modern bacteria. Since antibiotics are initially nothing more than a chemical weapon of some bacteria (and fungi) against others, then they are primarily sought among microorganisms, and most often among those that live in the soil. So, two years ago we wrote about a new antibiotic with a very wide spectrum of action synthesized by the soil bacterium Eleftheria terrae.

But sometimes new antibacterial substances turn out to be closer than one might have expected. Last year, an article was published in Nature describing an antibiotic that was isolated from the human nose, that is, from the bacteria of the nasal microflora. It turned out that this antibiotic even works against MRSA – the infamous strain of Staphylococcus aureus, resistant to a variety of substances. 

And just the other day at the annual conference of the American Microbiological Society, researchers from Howard University reported that lactic acid bacteria, which can be found in ordinary yogurt, can serve as an effective weapon against drug-resistant microbes. 

Rachelle Allen-McFarlane and her colleagues discovered that yogurt bacteria Lactobacillus parafarraginis KU495926 secretes a special protein that inhibits the growth of fourteen pathogenic bacteria with multiple antibiotic resistance. These resistant bacteria were taken from patients with infectious diseases, and if infectious microbes were forced to grow in an environment where L.parafarraginis KU495926 previously lived, then pathogenic bacteria either did not grow at all, or grew poorly. 

The protein synthesized by the yogurt bacterium belongs to the class of bacteriocins. Usually they act on more or less close strains of microorganisms, which is understandable - the greatest competition for resources occurs between close relatives. However, the bacteriocin L.parafarraginis KU495926 worked against such varieties of bacteria that are very far from the yogurt lactobacillus itself – this is rare, but it happens. 

In general, microbes with bacteriocins are widely used in the food industry as a natural remedy against unwanted bacteria; in the pharmaceutical industry, little attention is paid to them, although perhaps it is this bacteriocin acting against drug-resistant strains that can give rise to a new generation of antibiotics. 

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  08.06.2017