TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search resultsScientists map genetic codes of 3,000 dangerous bacteria
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
The genomic maps of the 3,000 strains are to be published on the NCTC's website and made freely available to researchers worldwide to help them in the development of potential new diagnostic tests, vaccines or treatments. (Shutterstock/File)
S
cientists seeking new ways to fight drug-resistant superbugs have mapped the genomes of more than 3,000 bacteria, including samples of a bug taken from Alexander Fleming's nose and a dysentery-causing strain from a World War One soldier.
The DNA of deadly strains of plague, dysentery and cholera were also decoded in what the researchers said was an effort to better understand some of the world's most dangerous diseases and develop new ways to fight them.
The samples from Fleming - the British scientist credited with discovering the first antibiotic, penicillin, in 1928 - were among more than 5,500 bugs at Britain's National Collection of Type Cultures (NCTC) one of the world's largest collections of clinically relevant bacteria.
The first bacteria to be deposited in the NCTC was a strain of dysentery-causing Shigella flexneri that was isolated in 1915 from a soldier in the trenches of World War One.
"Knowing very accurately what bacteria looked like before and during the introduction of antibiotics and vaccines, and comparing them to current strains, ... shows us how they have responded to these treatments," said Julian Parkhill of Britain's Wellcome Sanger Institute who co-led the research.
Read also: Bacteria makes blue jeans green
"This in turn helps us develop new antibiotics and vaccines."
Specialists estimate that around 70 percent of bacteria are already resistant to at least one antibiotic that is commonly used to treat them.
This has made the evolution of "superbugs" that can evade one or multiple drugs one of the biggest threats facing medicine today.
Among the most serious risks are tuberculosis - which infects more than 10.4 million people a year and killed 1.7 million in 2016 alone - and gonorrhoea, a sexually transmitted disease that infects 78 million people a year and which the World Health Organization says is becoming almost untreatable.
The genomic maps of the 3,000 strains are to be published on the NCTC's website and made freely available to researchers worldwide to help them in the development of potential new diagnostic tests, vaccines or treatments.
