New Stanford Antibiotic Research Helps Understand, Kill Bacteria

PALO ALTO, CA -- With drug-resistant infections on the rise and development of new antibiotics on the decline, the world could use a new strategy in the fight against increasingly hard-to-master bacteria, the Stanford News Service reported.

Stanford chemists in the Journal of the American Chemical Society have chronicled a possible solution, a small molecular attachment that helps conventional antibiotics penetrate and destroy their targets.

The attachment known as r8 helps guide antibiotics through a bacterium's outer defenses and encourages them to linger, said Alexandra Antonoplis, a graduate student in chemistry and co-lead author with fellow chemistry graduate student Xiaoyu Zang. The penetration kills the bacteria, the News Service notes.