The samples were pulled from the depths of the Arctic Ocean
Researchers have made a groundbreaking medical discovery at the bottom of the ocean following on from an arctic expedition in 2020.
The adventurous scientists took to the seas around the island of Svalbard to trawl for a special kind of deep-sea microbe that could be the solution to an impending crisis that will effect all of humanity.
This of course concerns the looming anti-biotic crisis which has seen pathogens become more resistant to our current anti-biotic medication.
These clever drugs fight bacterial infections and, despite modern methods of synthesising these medications, they in fact originate in nature.
The most famous of these is penicillin, discovered by Alexander Flemming and is a type of mould.
Despite the worrying news of more resistant diseases, there is always hope which comes in the form of a simple percentage.
Seventy-percent of all anti-biotics currently originate from soil and therefore leave plenty of sea-born sources to discover.
This is exactly what Study lead Professor Paivi Tammela from the University of Helsinki, Finland, and her team have been researching after an expedition to the Arctic Circle returned samples of deep-sea microorganism back in August 2020.
Tammela has been analysing the samples that were taken from four types of actinobacteria that were growing on invertebrates in the freezing ocean.
These bacteria were subsequently grown out until their cell contents were extracted and spliced.
The small pieces were then placed into a petri dish to wage a war against E.coli pathogens which the researchers have been focusing on.
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As per the Daily Star, Prof. Tammela said: “We show how advanced screening assays can identify anti-virulence and antibacterial metabolites from actinobacteria extracts.”
“We discovered a compound that inhibits enteropathogenic E. coli (EPEC) virulence without affecting its growth, and a growth-inhibiting compound, both in actinobacteria from the Arctic Ocean.”
The scientists discovered two previously unknown compounds that could prove revolutionary in fending of bacterial threats dubbed T091-5 and T160-2 of Korcuria.
Prof Tammela said: “The next steps are the optimisation of the culture conditions for compound production and the isolation of sufficient amounts of each compound to elucidate their respective structures and further investigate their respective bioactivities.”
So it appears that while everyone was panicking for solutions to finding new medicines to fight of constant bacterial dangers, we should have been looking in some of the most unhospitable places on the planet, in the cold, dark depths of the Arctic Ocean.
