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September 24 (UPI) – In 1928, the scientist Alexander Fleming discovered the first antibiotic, penicillin. The antibiotic was produced by a mold that had started to grow in a Petri dish in Fleming’s lab.
Now, nearly a century later, scientists have successfully sequenced the genome of the original template, a member of the genus Penicillium, and compared it with those of later penicillin-producing molds.
The analysis, published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, showed that the mold strains used to produce penicillin industrially in the United States and Europe synthesize the antibiotic in slightly different ways.
The discovery could help researchers develop new techniques to produce antibiotics on an industrial scale.
“We originally set out to use Alexander Fleming’s mushroom for a few different experiments, but we realized, to our surprise, that no one had sequenced the genome of this original Penicillium, despite its historical importance to the field,” said the researcher Principal Timothy Barraclough. an evolutionary biologist and professor at Oxford University and Imperial College London, said in a press release.
After Fleming’s discovery, drug manufacturers began using mold from moldy melons to produce penicillin, selecting strains with the highest production volumes of antibiotics.
To sequence the Fleming genome Penicillium mold, the researchers allowed a frozen sample of the original mold to regenerate before extracting the DNA.
When comparing Fleming’s mold with modern strains, the researchers focused on the genes that regulate the enzymes responsible for penicillin production. Scientists also paid close attention to the genes that regulate the production of these enzymes.
Molds developed penicillin production in response to the threat of invading microbes. Scientists suspect that differences in microbial threats in the United States and Europe caused industrial mold strains, and the wild Penicillium molds from which they are derived, to develop slightly different antibiotic production enzymes.
The researchers hope that follow-up studies will provide additional information on how genetic differences between the two strains of mold influence the regulation of penicillin-producing enzymes.
“Our research could help inspire novel solutions to combat antibiotic resistance. Industrial production of penicillin focused on the amount produced, and the steps used to artificially improve production led to changes in the number of genes,” said the first author of the study, Ayush Pathak, a computational biologist at Imperial.
“But industrial methods may have overlooked some solutions to optimize penicillin design, and we can learn from natural responses to the evolution of antibiotic resistance,” said Pathak.
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