A novel roadmap through bacterial genomes leads the way to new drug discovery
Monday, October 6, 2014 - 09:31
in Biology & Nature
For millennia, bacteria and other microbes have engaged in intense battles of chemical warfare, attempting to edge each other out of comfortable ecological niches. Doctors fight pathogens with an arsenal of weapons—antibiotics—co-opted from these microbial wars, but their efforts are frustrated by the development of drug resistance that outpaces drug discovery. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northwestern University have now innovated and demonstrated the value of an algorithm to analyze microbial genomic data and speed discovery of new therapeutic drugs.