Science's war against the super-small and, sometimes, super-deadly bacteria that have evolved to resist destruction by antibiotics may have just enlisted new, unlikely allies: invertebrate creatures living in the frigid depths of the Arctic Ocean.
Like an invading horde breaching the castle walls, there's a chance that one day, bacteria will be able to overcome all of our defenses and wreak their micro-havoc on humanity. While antibiotics have been fine fortifications since Alexander Fleming first found penicillin in 1928, their use over the years has only made the enemy stronger and more clever in avoiding treatment. Now, doctors are increasingly having to try out multiple antibiotics on some patients in order to stop germs that have become resistant to them.
On other fronts, scientists are researching ways to get around the defenses of these superbugs – from figuring out how to quickly identify them by the way they move to jamming the mechanisms they use to flush antibiotics from their surfaces.
Now, the war against these super small invaders may have just gotten a new boost – from animals that live in the deep sea.
Researchers from Finland and Norway used a new method they developed to screen hundreds of previously unknown compounds for their antiviral and antibacterial activities. Their work was aimed at finding some way to reduce the bugs' abilities to cause disease rather than to simply kill them or prevent their growth. That's because a full frontal attack that would lead to the death of the germs, or one that would harm their reproductive abilities, would cause them to evolve through the exact mechanism they've used over the years to develop resistance.
So instead, they found a compound that disrupts the way in which E. coli – a type of bacteria which can cause severe and sometimes deadly diarrhea in children under five – both attaches to the host's gut lining and the way in which it rewires itself to bring about disease. By blocking both of these processes, the bacteria was rendered less threatening yet also unlikely to develop resistance to the treatment.
A sponge and a scallop
The compounds were found from two deep sea invertebrates – creatures that lack a spinal column. One, T091-5, came from Chlamys islandica, more commonly known as the Iceland scallop and the other, T160-2, was found in Caulophacus arcticus, a deep sea sponge generally found in the Norwegian sea and known as a "glass sponge" due to the intricate matrix of its structure.
Both compounds interrupted the systems by which the E. coli germs cause damage, but of the two, only the one from the scallop didn't slow the growth of the E. coli. That means, the researchers say, it's the more promising of the two because it won't trigger the bug to evolve into a superbug.
Both compounds are types of actinobacteria. According to the researchers, actinobacteria found in our soil accounts for 70% of all licensed antibiotics on the market. Discovering a new class of the substances in deep sea creatures could therefore unlock the development of an entirely new class of compounds to deal with antibiotic-resistant bugs.
“The next steps are the optimization of the culture conditions for compound production and the isolation of sufficient amounts of each compound to elucidate their respective structures and further investigate their respective bioactivities,” said Päivi Tammela, a professor at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and the corresponding author of the new study, which appears in Frontiers in Microbiology.
Source: Frontiers
