Before penicillin was discovered, there was no effective treatment for infections, such as gonorrhea, rheumatic fever, and pneumonia. Doctors could do little for their patients suffering from blood poisoning caused by infections from a cut or scratch.
It was not until in 1928 when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin while working at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School. Fleming, a professor of bacteriology, accidentally discovered that mold in the genus Penicillium started growing in a petri dish of staphylococcus aureus, a bacteria that causes abscesses, boils, and sore throats.
He was surprised to see that the mold was suppressing the growth of bacteria and later found out that it can kill a wide range of bacteria. Hence the first antibiotic was discovered.
The genome of the original strain of penicillin sequenced
Researchers from Imperial College London, the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI), and the University of Oxford have sequenced the original strain of penicillin by regrowing it from a frozen culture kept in CABI.
Despite the historical significance of the genome of the original strain of Penicillium, no one has ever successfully sequenced it, said Prof Timothy Barraclough, the study lead author.
The industrial production of penicillin quickly moved to use fungus from moldy cantaloupes in the United States. The samples were artificially selected for strains that produce the greatest volumes of penicillin.
The researchers compared the two strains of penicillin with Fleming's original strain. They found several key differences in the genome that code for enzymes that produces penicillin found in different fungi. That means the Penicillium in the U.K. and the U.S. evolved naturally and create a slight difference in these enzymes that could potentially help the fight against antibiotic resistance.
Study first author, Ayush Pathak, from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial, said their research could inspire novel techniques in fighting antibiotic resistance. Due to the industrial production is focused on the amount produced, and also the artificial process involved to improve the production, it led to several changes in the genes.
But it is also possible that industrial production might have missed some solutions in optimizing penicillin design, Pathak said. From there, there may be something to learn from natural responses to the evolution of antibiotic resistance.
How does antibiotic work?
Antibiotics work by disrupting something specific in the bacterial biochemistry. One easily reached the feature of the bacteria in the cell wall, and many classes of antibiotics work by binding themselves onto the bacterial machinery that links the chain-ends together to clog up the bacteria.
Another significant feature of the bacteria that antibiotic targets are the ribosome, the cell's working machine, from the DNA. Bacterial and non-bacterial ribosomes work differently because bacterial ribosomes can be clogged by antibiotic drugs like tetracycline, erythromycin, streptomycin, and neomycin to inhibit protein production leading it to stop functioning.
Other antibiotic mechanisms also exist like how quinolones block the bacterial DNA untangling machinery, and sulfonamides are blocking the folate production needed for making DNA.
Read Also: Coconut Oil Acts As a Natural Antibiotic and Helps Boost Immunity
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