{"id":698664,"date":"2026-06-11T23:59:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T23:59:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/698664\/"},"modified":"2026-06-11T23:59:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T23:59:10","slug":"new-antibiotic-found-in-dirt-targets-superbugs-in-a-way-never-been-seen-before","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/698664\/","title":{"rendered":"New Antibiotic Found in Dirt Targets Superbugs in a Way \u2018Never Been Seen Before’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Researchers have worried<\/a> for decades that all the \u201clow-hanging fruit\u201d for new antibiotics have already been taken, leaving drug developers with the unenviable task of clawing and scraping for any incremental wins against a host of increasingly antibiotic-resistant bacteria<\/a>. But they just found something new and promising that\u2019s always been here, just squirming in the dirt.<\/p>\n

Biochemists and pharmaceutical scientists collaborating from the U.S., Canada, and Germany have discovered a new and naturally made antibiotic, manikomycin, produced by the same strangely aromatic<\/a> soil bacteria that gave modern medicine the antibiotic oxytetracycline in the 1950s. Thus far, it\u2019s proven effective at killing at least one notably antibiotic-resistant form of pneumonia (Klebsiella pneumoniae)\u2014and it opens up an entirely new mechanism by which these drugs can fight bacterial infections.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what really caught the researchers\u2019 attention: how manikomycin works. The antibiotic binds to ribosomes inside the infecting bacteria, interfering with their ability to make proteins and blocking important molecules from leaving these vital cellular organelles<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe ribosome is the target of about one third of all antibiotics prescribed currently,\u201d study author Dmitrii Travin said<\/a> in a statement put out by the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), where he teaches<\/a> on the pharmaceutical applications of genomics.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis new antibiotic is amazing because it targets a site of the ribosome that has never been targeted by any other molecule before,\u201d Travin said.<\/p>\n

Down in the dirt <\/p>\n

Technically, manikomycin is a peptide, a category of (by now<\/a>) almost comically trendy chains of two or more amino acids<\/a> that can often act as hormones, immunity boosters, neurotransmitters, or other kinds of messenger molecules inside the body. Specifically, it\u2019s what\u2019s known<\/a> as a \u201ccationic antimicrobial peptide,\u201d a natural immune system player made by mammals, amphibians, insects, and\u2014most importantly for our purposes here\u2014the soil-dwelling bacterium Streptomyces rimosus.<\/p>\n

Researchers working with McMaster University\u2019s antibiotics discovery center screened material from 255 bacterial strains housed in the school\u2019s Wright Actinomycetes Collection (WAC<\/a>), hunting for rare or overlooked natural antibiotics produced by bacteria themselves. Life\u2019s tough in the dirt for S. rimosus, please understand, so producing antibiotics that help it kill its rivals has been essential to its survival.<\/p>\n

The UIC and McMaster teams tested manikomycin against a range of microbes and found it was especially effective against E. coli and antibiotic-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae. Roughly three or four of these E. coli bacteria survived to pass on genetic resistance per every ten billion subjected to manikomycin, according to their new study<\/a>, published this month in the journal Nature. The K. pneumoniae superbug did a little better\u2014about one in every hundred million survived.<\/p>\n

The researchers suspect that the sheer novelty of how manikomycin messes with these microbes\u2019 ribosomes leaves them struggling to develop a new line of defense.<\/p>\n

\u201cBacteria need to jump through hoops to find resistance,\u201d as antibiotics specialist Alexander Mankin, Travin\u2019s colleague at UIC\u2019s Retzky College of Pharmacy, put it in a statement.<\/p>\n

Ready to scale up <\/p>\n

Medicinal chemist Derek Lowe, a career pharmaceutical industry researcher who blogs about drug discoveries for the journal Science, described<\/a> manikomycin as a \u201creally good example\u201d of an overlooked compound ripe for further investigation. But the peptide itself, he noted in his independent commentary, \u201cis not going to be a wonder drug.\u201d<\/p>\n

Manikomycin works against \u201cselect species\u201d of bacteria, Lowe wrote, but not all\u2014failing against most so-called Gram-positives, for example, a category of bacteria that includes staph<\/a> infections. Nevertheless, he marvelled at the discovery of a compound whose bacteria-fighting mechanism, he said, \u201chas never been seen before in such an antibiotic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mankin, Travin, and their coauthors acknowledge as much in their study while also identifying another hurdle between their findings and an actual drug that doctors might one day prescribe. Manikomycin, they noted, appears to metabolize quickly in the body.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis antibiotic does not hang around long enough in the bloodstream to efficiently kill bacteria in animals or humans,\u201d according to Mankin, \u201cso there are several things about this antibiotic that need to be improved before it can become a clinically used medicine.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Researchers have worried for decades that all the \u201clow-hanging fruit\u201d for new antibiotics have already been taken, leaving…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":698665,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[44189,8612,97,230841,69534],"class_list":["post-698664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-antibiotic-resistance","tag-antibiotics","tag-health","tag-medical-discoveries","tag-soil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=698664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698664\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/698665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=698664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=698664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}