A new chemical compound extracted from a marine microorganism found in sediments off the coast of Santa Barbara in California, US could lead to a new class of antibiotics for anthrax and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).
A team led by William Fenical at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, working with San Diego-based Trius Therapeutics, used spectroscopy to decode the unusual structure of a molecule, first collected by Chris Kauffman of Fenical’s team in 2012, from a microscopic species known as Streptomyces.
Initial testing of the new compound, which the scientists called anthracimycin, revealed its potency as a killer of infectious diseases, as well as of MRSA.
Details are reported in the international edition of the German journal Angewandte Chemie.
‘The real importance of this work is the fact that anthracimycin has a new and unique chemical structure,’ said Fenical, who added that the discovery could lead to testing and development, and eventually a drug. The discovery of truly new antibiotic compounds is quite rare.’
‘This discovery adds to many previous discoveries that show that marine bacteria are genetically and chemically unique.’
The National Institutes of Health and the Transformational Medical Technologies program of the Department of Defense Chemical and Biological Defense Program through the Defense Threat Reduction Agency supported the research.
