When bread gets green and fuzzy

Don't eat it. That's the first thing.

But you will recall penicillin. Made by Penicillium, a capable combatant of the war of microbes on pretty much all other microbes.

That genus has now been genetically sequenced very thoroughly. There are a large number of possible new useful (for us) antibiotics in there.

Many new antimicrobials are developed from blindly culturing soils and seeing what happens. This seems to me a different approach; take a much closer look at a well-known warfighter. We have many decades of experience growing Penicillium in bubbling vats (or however it is done).

By the way, if your bread is black and fuzzy, that's even worse. Don't even open the bag before throwing it away.

 

Penicillin has some interesting back stories. First is assertion that Fleming would not have ever had it overgrowing his (bacterial) plates if his lab technique were good. But I urge readers to let that one go - sometimes mistakes have good results especially when researcher is insightful enough to notice implications of 'work gone wrong'.

Second is that Fleming was, well, sort of a dutz. It was left to later researchers to really dig into the phenomenon. Later ones (Florey & team) actually showed that penicillin 'worked'.

Third, the source fungus produced very little. A different one (found on a moldy cantaloupe in Peoria Illinois) make much more. Yet another series of happy accidents. But that was still not enough, and x-rays and other mutation causers were employed to jack that up.

Fourth, all this was happening against a backdrop of WWII. Everybody knew that post-wound infections were bigger killers than direct injury. But one side had penicillin and the other did not. One can read that penicillin won the war. This may be accurate. Hard to know for sure.

Fifth (mentioned elsewhere in PriusChat) most penicillin is excreted unchanged in human urine, so one early kludge involved collecting pee.

Wrapping up, penicillin opened our eyes to benefit from microbial warfare that had been underway since basically forever. One could scarcely invent a less 'rational' way to begin such a story. But there you have it - we are a large troupe of accidentalists. Scientific method is a way to make our accidents yield benefits. At least that is one way to describe it.

 

Antibacterials in the news:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170510132012.htm

On your reading list because it is worth knowing that there are two types of bacteria. Those with simple cell walls, and those that really defend the castle. Latter type only invites molecules in that resemble amino acids. Biochemists are getting better with such trickery.

 

Media coverage of another new publication about antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Starting quite a long time ago:

Ancestors Of Antibiotic-Resistant Superbugs 'Crawled Out' Of The Ocean 450 Million Years Ago : Goats and Soda : NPR