Indian scientists move ahead in study on drug-resistant bacteria
The cell wall is fundamental in the growth of bacteria and its division.
Hyderabad: New strategies to target antibiotic resistant bacteria are the focus of scientists worldwide, and Indian scientists from the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology have succeeded in developing a mechanism which has the potential to regulate the growth of the cell wall in the bacteria.
These findings have been published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), USA, showing that this discovery will play an important role in the development of a new class of antibiotics and also address the present problem of antibiotic resistance.
Manjula Reddy, senior researcher at CCMB, in whose laboratory the research was carried out, said, “Antibiotic medicine targets the machinery that creates the bacterial cell wall, which is a mesh-like structure made of sugars and peptides. The cell wall is fundamental in the growth of bacteria and its division. In our laboratory, we have focused on the different dimensions of the process of synthesis and from here, developed a mechanism to regulate the growth of the cell wall.”
This regulation will then work like scissors where the existing threads in the cell wall will be blocked and new methods evolved to target microbes, explained the director of CCMB Dr Rakesh Mishra.
Dr Mishra said that was a cutting edge finding in basic research at CCMB.