Communications of the ACM
Antibiotic Resistance Outwitted by Supercomputers
This is the first study to use a multi-pronged computer-guided strategy to make a new antibiotic from an existing one which bacteria have outwitted.
Credit: Gerhard Koenig
An international team of scientists has used supercomputing to strengthen existing antibiotics' effectiveness against bacterial resistance.
The researchers crafted a strategy to model many aspects of a redesigned antibiotic simultaneously, including solubility, bacteria infiltration, and protein production inhibition.
A leading European supercomputer completed the model in weeks, but the team spent several years validating the approach experimentally.
"Using a computational approach makes the development of new antibiotic derivatives faster and cheaper, and predicting whether a chemical compound is going to be active before it is synthesized also avoids chemical waste," said Gerhard Koenig at the U.K.'s University of Portsmouth.
From University of Portsmouth (U.K.)
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Abstracts Copyright © 2021 SmithBucklin, Washington, DC, USA
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