‘Nose-y’ bacteria could yield a new way to fight infection
NPR - 07/27/2016
The really important contribution of this study is not lugdunin itself, says microbiologist Kim Lewis of Northeastern University, but rather the new approach for finding antibiotic-producing bacteria within our own bodies.
“The reason we ran out of antibiotics in the first place is because most of them came from soil bacteria and they make up 1 percent of the total [bacterial] diversity,” Lewis says.
Scientists kept searching in soil, he says, because they already had some success there and know that soil bacteria are exceptionally good at producing antibiotics.