HomeScience and ResearchScientific ResearchInfection Bacteria-killing Drills Finally Get an Upgrade - Breakthrough Study

Infection Bacteria-killing Drills Finally Get an Upgrade – Breakthrough Study

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Scientists have taught the molecular machines that kill harmful bacteria to see their target in a new light.

The most recent version of the nanoscale drills made at Rice University works with visible light instead of ultraviolet (UV) light, which was used in previous versions. In testing on real infections, they have also been found to be effective in destroying bacteria.

Rice chemist James Tour and his team successfully tested six molecular machine variations. In as little as two minutes, they all punched holes in the membranes of gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria. Bacteria, which have no natural defenses against mechanical invaders, had no chance of winning by trying to fight back. That means they’re unlikely to develop resistance, which means they could be used to combat bacteria that have developed resistance to standard antibiotic treatments over time.

“I tell students that when they are my age, antibiotic-resistant bacteria are going to make COVID look like a walk in the park,” Tour says. “Antibiotics won’t be able to keep 10 million people a year from dying of bacterial infections. But this really stops them.”

The groundbreaking research, headed by Tour and Rice graduates Ana Santos and Dongdong Liu, was published in Science Advances.

The Rice lab has been perfecting its molecules for years because prolonged exposure to UV can be harmful to people. The new version obtains its energy from 405 nanometer light, which spins the molecules’ rotors at a rate of 2 to 3 million times per second.

Other researchers have suggested that light at that wavelength has weak antibacterial capabilities on its own, but adding molecular machines boosts it, according to Tour, who believes that bacterial diseases like those encountered by burn victims and persons with gangrene will be the first targets.

The machines are based on Nobel Laureate Bernard Feringa’s work in 1999 when he created the first molecule with a rotor and got it to spin reliably in one direction. In a 2017 Nature piece, Tour and his colleagues described their advanced drills.

The novel compounds’ capacity to kill bacteria swiftly was confirmed in the Rice lab’s first experiments on burn wound infection models, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a frequent cause of skin and soft tissue infections that killed over 100,000 people in 2019.

By adding a nitrogen group, the team was able to accomplish visible light activation. “The molecules were further modified with different amines in either the stator (stationary) or the rotor portion of the molecule to promote the association between the protonated amines of the machines and the negatively charged bacterial membrane,” added Liu, who is now a scientist at Arcus Biosciences in California.

The researchers also found that the machines were good at breaking up biofilms and “persister” cells, which lie dormant to avoid being killed by antibiotics.

“Even if an antibiotic kills most of a colony, there are often a few persister cells that for some reason don’t die,” Tour explained. “But that doesn’t matter to the drills.”

The new devices, like previous iterations, claim to resurrect antibacterial medications that have been deemed ineffective. “Drilling through the microorganisms’ membranes allows otherwise ineffective drugs to enter cells and overcome the bug’s intrinsic or acquired resistance to antibiotics,” added Santos.

By attaching bacterium-specific peptide tags to the drills and directing them toward pathogens of interest, the lab hopes to improve bacteria targeting and reduce damage to mammalian cells.

“But even without that, the peptide can be applied to a site of bacterial concentration, like in a burn wound area,” Santos said.

Image Credit: Getty

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