Alexander Fleming’s penicillin mold likely to combat superbugs

Anuska Sen, Team bioXone

Superbugs are microbes which have gained resistance against anti-microbial substances such as antibiotics. These organisms have the potential to spread havoc destruction as methods to control them are relatively less known yet. These microorganisms can cause diseases like urinary tract infections, pneumonia, skin infections which cannot be easily treated by their usual antibiotics. Scientific approaches which can work against antimicrobial resistance might be useful to fight these superbugs.

A recent study conducted by researcher Ayush Pathak and team reports that strains of Penicillium might be useful weapons to cope up with the randomly evolving antibiotic resistance. A new genome sequencing of the original fungus used by Alexander Fleming in the 1920s offers a much better and effective way of designing penicillin which will supposedly be potent in mitigating superbugs.

The “two high producing industrial strains” of Penicillium now prevalent worldwide to produce the antibiotic is different than the one actually isolated by Fleming. They differ in the three predominant effector genes (namely pcbAB, pcbC and penDE) in the production of penicillin. Industrial production of penicillin requires a high amount of end product which led to the necessity of introducing artificial methods to improve the production quantity. As a result o such improvisations, there have been alterations in the original strain of Penicillium which has given rise to the present day “high producing industrial strains”.

The study reports that a significant amount of divergence has been noticed in the penicillin producing genes among different Penicillium strains. Optimization of penicillin designing, involving simple amino acid substitutions might be instrumental in coping up with the evolving antibiotic resistance. Thus, it can be said that the new genome sequencing of Fleming’s penicillin mold suggests new ways to optimize penicillin production, such that the penicillin has enhanced effect against antimicrobial resistance.

This article has been published in Nature

Source: Pathak A., Nowell R.W., Wilson C.G., Ryan M.J., Barraclough T.G.; (2020) Comparative genomics of Alexander Fleming’s original Penicillium isolate (IMI 15378) reveals sequence divergence of penicillin synthesis genes. Scientific Reports: 10, 15705 

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-72584-5

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