Researchers at McMaster University have discovered unique characteristics of a mechanism used by bacteria to resist an important class of antibiotics. The new research, published in Nature Chemical Biology, shows that resistance to aminoglycoside drugs—used to treat a variety of infections—is far more complex than initially thought.
Lead investigator Gerry Wright, professor of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences at McMaster, says his lab observed never-before-seen versatility in ApmA, a long-studied bacterial resistance gene. The research showed that the gene can uncharacteristically enable bacteria to perform different functions against different antibiotics.
Of the hundred-or-more aminoglycoside resistance enzymes known to researchers, Wright says only this one has exhibited such nimble behavior.
“It’s a unicorn,” he says. “It looks different, it operates differently, and it belongs to an entirely different family of enzymes. It’s completely different from all of the resistance mechanisms that we associate with this class of antibiotic.”
Wright, a member of the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research, says aminoglycosides were among the earliest antibiotics with clinical relevance—and the first-ever to be useful against tuberculosis. But because they’ve been prescribed since the 1940s, he says “resistance to them has become a real issue“—except in the case of apramycin.
2023-11-23 03:41:02
Link from phys.org rnrn