MicroCulture

A 25-year-old student has just come up with a way to fight drug-resistant superbugs without antibiotics.

The new approach has so far only been tested in the lab and on mice, but it could offer a potential solution to antibiotic resistance, which is now getting so bad that the United Nations recently declared it a “fundamental threat” to global health.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria already kill around 700,000 people each year, but a recent study suggests that number could rise to around 10 million by 2050.

In addition to common hospital superbug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), scientists are now also concerned that gonorrhoea is about tobecome resistant to all remaining drugs.

But Shu Lam, a 25-year-old PhD student at the University of Melbourne in Australia, has developed a star-shaped polymer that can kill six different superbug strains without antibiotics, simply by ripping apart their cell walls.

“We’ve discovered that [the polymers] actually target the bacteria and kill it in multiple ways,” Lam told Nicola Smith from The Telegraph. “One method is by physically disrupting or breaking apart the cell wall of the bacteria. This creates a lot of stress on the bacteria and causes it to start killing itself.”

The research has been published in Nature Microbiology, and according to Smith, it’s already being hailed by scientists in the field as “a breakthrough that could change the face of modern medicine”.

Before we get too carried away, it’s still very early days. So far, Lam has only tested her star-shaped polymers on six strains of drug-resistant bacteria in the lab, and on one superbug in live mice.

But in all experiments, they’ve been able to kill their targeted bacteria - and generation after generation don’t seem to develop resistance to the polymers.

Make Your Own Microbial Medley: A Famous Investigation To Do At Home

The poet William Blake prodded us to “see a world in a grain of sand,” and this simple project does just that—only with a cupful of mud! Just add a few other easy-to-find ingredients to create an entire ecosystem for bacteria called a Winogradsky column. Over several weeks, different species will separate into visible layers depending on how they use—or don’t use—oxygen, light, and nutrients such as carbon or sulfur. It’s a living lesson in how microbes play an essential role in the life cycle as they reuse and recycle nutrients, not unlike the way the bacteria that inhabit our bodies break down foods to give us energy. Or as Rob DeSalle, co-curator of the special exhibition The Secret World Inside You, likes to say, “The human digestive tract is one huge Winogradsky column.”

Slime can see                

After more than 300 years of looking, scientists have figured out how bacteria “see” their world. And they do it in a remarkably similar way to us.

A team of British and German researchers reveal in the journal eLife how bacterial cells act as the equivalent of a microscopic eyeball or the world’s oldest and smallest camera eye.

“The idea that bacteria can see their world in basically the same way that we do is pretty exciting,” says lead researcher Conrad Mullineaux, Professor of Microbiology from QMUL’s School of Biological and Chemical Sciences from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).