Can you imagine the world without medicine?
Nowadays, more and more bacteria begin to show resistance against antibiotics. Azomycin, a type of antibiotics used to treat multi-drug resistance is found to be used more and more frequently. What if bacteria start to grow resistance against Azomycin? However, it is actually nailed fact, the only question is when. In order to solve this problem, in 2019, Dr. Jason Hedges and Dr. Katherine Ryan of the University of British Columbia engaged in finding a new way to synthesize the nitroimidazole, the main component of azomycin.
source:https://www.reactgroup.org/toolbox/understand/how-did-we-end-up-here/few-antibiotics-under-development/
The study of antibiotics can be traced back to the 19th century. For these two centuries, antibiotics saved countless lives from all kinds of diseases. However, antibiotics can not kill all the bacteria. Every time when one bacteria survived from the massacre of the antibiotic, they grow the resistance against the antibiotic. Then it split, split and split. Finally, the survived bacteria become countless bacteria that can not be defeated by the antibiotic again. Thus, more and more bacteria begin to survive from the war with antibiotics, and more and more antibiotics become useless. Herein, the race between the evolving of antibiotics and evolving of bacteria begins.
So, let’s take a look at what did Dr. Jason Hedges and Dr. Katherine Ryan do and what did they find.
By doing a lot of research, Dr. Jason Hedges and Dr. Katherine Ryan found that the development of nitroimidazole can be dated back to 1953 when azomycin was first found. And they noticed that when strain Streptomyces eurocidicus was produced, L-arginine is converted to azomycin. Therefore, they came up with a plan to synthesis nitroimidazoles by linking L-arginine to azomycin via in vitro reconstitution.
In vitro reconstitution process of nitroimidazole. Source: Hedges and Ryan, 2019
Through the experiment, Dr. Jason Hedges and Dr. Katherine Ryan successfully synthesized nitroimidazole via in vitro reconstitution. But unfortunately, no azomycin was produced via Streptomyces cattleya.
Although the experiment is failed to synthesis azomycin through Streptomyces cattleya, it still provides a lot of valuable information for further researchers. It points a direction on the biocatalytic pathway of azomycin synthesis and set the stage for the discovery of new antibiotics.
Reference:
Hedges, J. B.; Ryan, K. S. In Vitro Reconstitution of the Biosynthetic Pathway to the Nitroimidazole Antibiotic Azomycin. Angewandte Chemie International Edition 2019, 58 (34), 11647–11651.
Yicheng Zhu
