Nature Briefing on a brand new antibiotic(or was it there all along?)

Today, gentle readers, we bring you really good news in our joint quest to finally overcome the problem of antibiotic resistant micro organisms. And it comes of course from Nature Briefing, that indispensable source of all good science news and reporting. Let’s start with their summary Antibiotic was hiding in plain sight, and then briefly run through all the implications

Scientists have discovered a powerful antibiotic while studying the process through which a soil bacterium naturally produces a well-known drug. The compound — called premethylenomycin C lactone — is more than 100 times more active against bacteria than the final product, antibiotic methylenomycin A, which was first identified in 1965. Tiny doses of the surprise discovery killed strains of bacteria known to cause hard-to-treat infections.Nature | 5 min read
Reference: Journal of the American Chemical Society paper

Okay, so wanted the implications? Firstly for us at LSS. Great reassurance to see progress in our core area of real, old-skool antibiotics. Now, if these make a comeback, can they please be used sparingly, and in conjunction with therapies like vaccines and bacteriophages, so we are not in this whole mess again around the year 2065? Secondly, the new compound premethylenomycin C , though only a precursor is a hundred times more powerful than methylenomycin A. As Dr Challis, one of the co-authors of the work observes, that’s a turn up for the evolutionary book if ever there was one. But for us the Big One is how many years of painstaking research this all took, how many tiny detailed steps in the synthetic chain had to be weeded out. They started back in 2006 when one George W Bush was still President of the United States and everyone thought that Katy Perry was the way of the future. Blue sky abstract research; done as much out of intellectual curiosity as anything else. Which is odd. Because every so often one of our Right Leaning media outlets comes up with tropes such as WOI ARE VE WYESTIN ORL DIS TEXPAYUHS MUNNI ONNER RESURTCH WOT DON’T DO NUFFINK? SPEN IT ON SUMFIN USEFUL GUVNOR, INNIT! Which raises a deep question; how do you measure the value of research like premethylenomycin ? The costs are small but substantial enough to cash-strapped Universities. But the pay-off is almost infinite. That one we will leave to you, faithful readers of our words.

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03595-3?utm_source=Live+Audience&utm_campaign=f5bcecac99-

#antibiotics #biochemistry #microbio;ogy #medicine #health #antibiotic resistance