{"id":267422,"date":"2026-01-31T17:21:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-31T17:21:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/267422\/"},"modified":"2026-01-31T17:21:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-31T17:21:07","slug":"chemical-inhibitor-helps-viruses-overcome-bacterial-immune-defenses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/267422\/","title":{"rendered":"Chemical inhibitor helps viruses overcome bacterial immune defenses"},"content":{"rendered":"

Antimicrobial resistance – when bacteria and fungi defend themselves against the drugs design to kill them – is an\u202furgent threat to global public health, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.<\/p>\n

To combat this threat, the Gerdt Lab at Indiana University Bloomington studies how to weaken bacteria’s defenses against viruses.<\/p>\n

“Bacteria get sick, too,” said J.P. Gerdt, assistant professor of chemistry\u202fin\u202fthe College of Arts and Sciences at\u202fIU\u202fBloomington. “Our lab tries to understand how\u202ftheir\u202fimmune systems work\u202fso we can figure out how to inhibit them.”\u202f<\/p>\n

Bacteriophages, the\u202fviruses\u202fthat\u202fattack and kill bacteria,\u202f can be a useful alternative to antibiotics.\u202fAntibiotics kill not just pathogens but also good bacteria, but bacteriophages can be deployed in a more targeted way to kill just one problematic strain of bacteria, leaving beneficial microbes untouched.<\/p>\n

Bacteriophages are also useful in agriculture because they provide a more targeted approach to killing bacteria. Whereas many antibiotics tend to kill not just infection- and disease-causing bacteria but good bacteria as well, bacteriophages can be deployed to kill just one strain of bacteria.<\/p>\n

However,\u202fjust as bacteria\u202fhave\u202fevolved\u202fantibiotic resistance<\/a>, they can also become immune to\u202fbacteriophages.<\/p>\n

That is where the Gerdt Lab’s work comes in. Former lab member Zhiyu Zang, now a post-doctoral candidate at the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne, discovered a chemical molecule that when paired with the bacteriophage helps the virus overwhelm a bacteria’s immune system.<\/p>\n

This finding was\u202frevealed in\u202fZang\u202fand Gerdt’s\u202fpaper “Chemical inhibition of a bacterial immune system,” recently published in Cell Host and Microbe.<\/p>\n

While\u202fantibiotics\u202fwill\u202flikely\u202fremain\u202fthe first line of defense for human bacterial infections,\u202fthe Gerdt Lab’s discovery\u202fcould still apply to hard-to-treat infections in humans. It could also be applied in places like agriculture, where antibiotic overuse can worsen the spread of antibiotic resistance.<\/p>\n

A needle in a haystack<\/p>\n

Just as millions of bacteria strains exist, there are potentially as many chemical molecules that could be deployed to inhibit bacterial immune systems. Gerdt hopes that in 10 to 15 years, his lab will create a library of inhibitors for different bacteria.<\/p>\n

Gerdt and Zang’s strategy with this paper was to begin research with a bacterium that was relatively easy and safe for undergraduates to study. Students like Olivia Duncan, who\u202fwas an undergraduate when she worked in Gerdt’s lab,\u202fhelped\u202fZang and Gerdt find\u202fmolecules that chemically inhibited that\u202fbacterium’s\u202fimmune system.<\/p>\n

“Our study is important not just because we found the first example of a small molecule that can inhibit a bacteria’s immune system,” Zang\u202fsaid.\u202f”It’s also important because the immune system we’re studying in this paper is present in around 2,000 different bacteria species.”<\/p>\n

This finding allows them to develop general rules and tools for a targeted approach to pathogenic bacteria with similar immune systems like\u202f Pseudomonas aeruginosa or Staphylococcus\u202faureus, both\u202foften\u202fresistant to antibiotics and the cause of many deadly hospital-acquired infections.<\/p>\n

Duncan, who is the second author on the paper and currently a\u202fPh.D.\u202fstudent at Cornell University, worked with Zang to identify a chemical molecule\u00a0that helped a virus evade the bacterium’s immune system.<\/p>\n

“Our goal is to have a collection of inhibitors that will work for different immune systems,” Gerdt said. “We hope that this paper will be a catalyst for other labs to work on this with us as a community.\u202fThat’s what makes this paper so exciting:\u202fWe’re\u202fstarting something new and seeing where it takes off.”<\/p>\n

Source:<\/p>\n

Journal reference:<\/p>\n

DOI:\u00a010.1016\/j.chom.2026.01.003<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Antimicrobial resistance – when bacteria and fungi defend themselves against the drugs design to kill them – is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":62859,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[4386,22551,3901,11495,3486,28718,1353,497,6349,163,85,5204,46,9432,546,1360,125,5199],"class_list":{"0":"post-267422","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-agriculture","9":"tag-antibiotic","10":"tag-antibiotic-resistance","11":"tag-antimicrobial-resistance","12":"tag-bacteria","13":"tag-bacterial","14":"tag-cell","15":"tag-drugs","16":"tag-fungi","17":"tag-health","18":"tag-il","19":"tag-immune-system","20":"tag-israel","21":"tag-molecule","22":"tag-public-health","23":"tag-research","24":"tag-technology","25":"tag-virus"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267422\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}