Conspiracy Theories: How Bacteria Collude to Harm Us, and How Small Molecules Might Protect

Fellow Organic Chemists,

I attended the Biochemistry seminar two Fridays ago and have finally gotten around to posting about it.  First, I was happily surprised by how much Biology was discussed!  (I capitalize Biology because it is superior).  In a nutshell, the talk was about how bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics over time and how some labs are working to treat bacterial infections in a new way: targeting and shutting down their communication system.

I have an interest in medicine, so I was paying particular attention to this talk.  A major way bacteria harm us is by multiplying, collecting themselves into a biofilm, then secreting toxins in fairly high doses.  To form a biofilm, bacteria cells evidently need to secret messenger proteins and possess membrane proteins which serve as the basis for cell-cell recognition.  By targeting the genes for these membrane proteins and the messenger proteins, it seems possible to cut off the communication of the bacterial cells and thus, make biofilm formation and toxin secretion difficult if not impossible.

The Rgg operon (operon = genes that are always transcribed together as a unit) contains several genes.  One of them, Rgg 2, is important for biofilm formation.  Another, Rgg3, represses biofilm formation.  Dr. Michael Federle, one scientist researching these genes, thus argues that manipulation of either of these two genes could serve as the basis for the next antibiotic.  One specific method is to wait until the bacterial cells enter a stage called "competence," where they are ready to take up new genes, and insert a plasmid containing a form of either of these two genes that would hinder the cell's ability to divide and/or form a biofilm.

I loved this talk; human ingenuity knows no bounds, I'm confident in the near future research like this will lead to medicine that can be used to shut down most bacterial infections (at least until they evolve another way of synthesizing biofilms).  Also, this particular project represents a fusion of cellular biology, genetics, and organic chemistry (since some ligands in the biofilm formation process are cyclic organic compounds).