Lowering the defenses of bacteria.As bacteria have grown resistant to available antibiotics, many scientists have begun desperately searching for new drugs to kill the microorganisms. Some investigators have taken a different tack-interfering with the mechanisms that enable bacteria to resist drugs in the first place. Slipping genes that disarm those resistance mechanisms into bacteria makes the microorganisms again susceptible to antibiotics, Sidney Altman Sidney Altman (born May 7, 1939 in Montreal, Quebec) is a molecular biologist, who is currently the Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and Chemistry at Yale University. In 1989 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas R. of Yale University Yale University, at New Haven, Conn.; coeducational. Chartered as a collegiate school for men in 1701 largely as a result of the efforts of James Pierpont, it opened at Killingworth (now Clinton) in 1702, moved (1707) to Saybrook (now Old Saybrook), and in 1716 was and his colleagues report in the Aug. 5 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, usually referred to as PNAS, is the official journal of the United States National Academy of Sciences. . The genes used by Altman's team encode small strands of RNA RNA: see nucleic acid. RNA in full ribonucleic acid One of the two main types of nucleic acid (the other being DNA), which functions in cellular protein synthesis in all living cells and replaces DNA as the carrier of genetic called external guide sequences. If designed correctly, these RNA strands can bind to the protein-coding RNA strands produced by the bacteria's normal genes. This union calls into action an enzyme that destroys the protein-coding RNA. Altman's group designed its external guide sequences to join to the RNAs that code for bacterial enzymes that destroy or inactivate in·ac·ti·vate v. 1. To render nonfunctional. 2. To make quiescent. in·ac  ti·va antibiotics. By eliminating these RNAs, the scientists deprived the bacteria of their drug resistance, as they proved by testing the drugs on the microbes. "It's a very clever laboratory technique," says Stuart B. Levy of Tufts University School of Medicine The Tufts University School of Medicine is one of the eight schools that comprise Tufts University. Located on the university's health sciences campus in the Chinatown district of Boston, Massachusetts, the medical school has clinical affiliations with thousands of doctors and in Boston, who also studies ways to interfere with bacterial resistance mechanisms. Yet Levy is skeptical that Altman's strategy will prove useful. He notes that delivering genes into bacteria is easy in test tubes but much more difficult when the microorganisms are inside people. Moreover, physicians would have to, ensure that both the external guide sequence genes and the antibiotics reached the bacteria. "That's no easy trick," says Levy. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion