An unlikely superhero may have been identified in the fight against superbug MRSA–– the
An unlikely superhero may have been identified in the fight against superbug MRSA–– the human nose! Noses often contain Staphylococcus aureus, but apparently also contain a compound that acts as a natural enemy of MRSA (the methicillin-resistant strain of S. aureus.) Scientists at University of Tübingen in Germany isolated this nasal bacterium, S. lugdunensis, and discovered that it destroyed S. aureus in a petri dish when grown together.From ScienceNews.org: “We didn’t expect to find this. We were just trying to understand the ecology of the nose to understand how S. aureus causes problems,” bacteriologist Andreas Peschel of the University of Tübingen in Germany said at a news briefing July 26 during the EuroScience Open Forum. Investigating the intense interspecies competition in the nose — where microbes fight for space and access to scant sugars and amino acids — might offer a fertile alternative to searching for new drug candidates in soil microbes.”Learn more about this study and the possible antibiotic implications in the article “The nose knows how to fight staph” at ScienceNews.org, or read the study “Human commensals producing a novel antibiotic impair pathogen colonization” at Nature. -- source link
#microbiology#science#superbug#microbiome#staphylococcus aureus#s lugdunensis