Key Points
The promising new antibiotic is the result of a long-term collaboration between Yury Polikanovs laboratory at UIC, an associate professor of biological sciences, and colleagues at Harvard..
In developing the new antibiotic, the group focused on how many antibiotics interact with a common cellular target - the ribosome - and how drug-resistant bacteria modify their ribosomes to defend themselves...
More than half of all antibiotics inhibit the growth of pathogenic bacteria by interfering with their protein biosynthesis - a complex process catalysed by the ribosome, which is akin to a 3D printer that makes all the proteins in a cell, Polikanov said..
Polikanovs laboratory then used X-ray crystallography to investigate how certain drugs, including one published in Nature by the UIC/Harvard collaboration in 2021, circumvent this common form of bacterial resistance...
By determining the actual structure of antibiotics interacting with two types of drug-resistant ribosomes, we saw what could not have been predicted by the available structural data or by computer modelling, Polikanov said...
