A new bacterial molecule with the unsavory tendency to track down and kill others of its own kind has been discovered in the human microbiome by researchers at Princeton’s Department of Chemistry.
A new bacterial molecule with the unsavory tendency to track down and kill others of its own kind has been discovered in the human microbiome by researchers at Princeton’s Department of Chemistry. Named Streptosactin, it is the first small molecule found to exhibit fratricidal activity.
The discovery by the Seyedsayamdost lab is detailed in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS).
The research describes a veritable needle-in-a-haystack hunt in which streptosactin was located “at the edge of detection.” Its production is so minimal and so difficult to track that researchers achieved the results only through a complex interplay of factors.
They used a clever bioinformatic search strategy developed a few years ago by Leah Bushin, a sixth-year graduate student in the Seyedsayamdost lab. This “genome-first” approach allowed them to screen molecules for two key characteristics: community behavior (thus uncovering the fratricide), and structural or topological novelty.
Continue reading at Princeton University.
Image via C. Todd Reichart,
