The Age Of Infection ???

Kim Lewis collects dirt. For the past decade, he and his colleagues—all scientists in Massachusetts—have asked friends and family around the United States to send them 1-gallon Ziploc bags of backyard soil. It might not seem like much, but it turns out that a little grime can hold a trove of groundbreaking scientific discoveries.

In 2011, Lewis’s team began analyzing a bag of soil from a grassy field in Maine, focusing on bacteria naturally growing inside. The scientists mixed some of the dirt with water and nutrients—proteins, for instance, and potato starch—and poured the mixture over specially designed domino-sized plastic blocks punctured with dozens of tiny wells. Each minuscule compartment captured 20 microliters of the slurry, which, thanks to the dilution, contained just a single bacterial cell. Finally, the researchers packed the small plastic slabs in buckets with the remainder of the soil and left them alone for a month.

The procedure’s relative simplicity belied its true sophistication. When Lewis, a microbiology professor at Northeastern University, and the other researchers unearthed the blocks, they found just what they were hoping for: The bacteria had multiplied. The wells were teeming with microbes, many of which were species no scientist had ever studied.

The team analyzed 10,000 individual strains of the bacteria and tested whether they could kill other microbes by pitting them against one another in petri dishes. One species, which the scientists dubbed Eleftheria terrae (“free from the earth”), was an especially successful gladiator. The researchers pinpointed E. terrae’s primary weapon, a molecule they named teixobactin, and discovered that it could wipe out the microbes responsible for anthrax and tuberculosis. Teixobactin also saved mice from infections of MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), one of the most infamous superbugs—bacteria that are immune to several different drugs. What’s more, when the researchers coaxed the microbes to evolve resistance to teixobactin, it didn’t work.

In that bag of dirt, Lewis’s team had found an entirely new kind of antibiotic, one of only a few to emerge in the past 50 years—and a potent one at that. The findings, published this January, garnered widespread enthusiasm: “New Antibiotic May Conquer Superbugs,” declared NBCNews.com. “A New Antibiotic That Resists Resistance,” a blog post on National Geographic’s website proclaimed.

You can read the rest @
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/09/30/the-age-of-infection-antibiotics-microbes-germ-ichip/

Absolutely brilliant. Give that man a Nobel Prize in Medicine.

One question, though - Isn't infection one of Mother Nature's mechanisms for population control? And since humanity appears to be thwarting each and every natural control mechanism, aren't we headed toward an overpopulation disaster of some kind?

Just asking.