Christine Chow: Targeting resistant bacteria
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| Christine Chow |
Few discoveries have been as far-reaching and successful as the development of antibiotics. But a drop in research into new varieties over the past several decades, coupled with bacteria’s evolutionary drive to develop resistance, has caused the number of effective antibiotics to diminish with increasing speed.
Chemistry Professor Christine Chow is leading a research team in developing a novel strategy to get ahead of bacteria’s relentlessly evolving defense mechanisms. “Resistance is a huge problem,” Chow says. “There are now strains of bacteria that are completely resistant to every known drug. We want to create something new that isn’t as easy for bacteria to resist.”
The key to her research lies in ribonucleic acid, or RNA, which consists of a long chain of nucleotide units, chemically similar to DNA but consisting of one chain of nucleotides instead of DNA’s double helix. RNA has a number of functions, but a main task is containing the genetic “recipe” for synthesizing proteins.
The RNA of bacteria is one of the two most common targets for antibiotics – the other being enzymes that synthesize bacterial cell walls – for several reasons. First, RNA is more chemically and structurally diverse than other possible target areas, such as DNA, meaning RNA has an abundance of unique structures for an antibiotic to latch on to. It’s also more accessible than DNA, and doesn’t have the defense enzymes that protect DNA.
Lastly, RNA makes up the physical structure of the ribosome, RNA-protein complexes that are found in all living organisms. Ribosomes perform the essential function of synthesizing all the proteins in an organism. Like RNA itself, these protein-making machines can be found from bacteria all the way up to humans, and are important to maintaining life. Because of this importance, ribosomes are already one of the most common targets of antibiotics; one of the simplest ways to eliminate unwanted bacteria is to shut down their ribosomes.
Chow’s strategy for battling antibiotic resistance is to target a bacteria cell’s ribosomes, aiming at sites that are vulnerable and attacking them with a compound the bacteria has never seen before. Her efforts may one day lead to discovery of a drug that will be a challenge for bacteria to defend against, one that will potentially lead to a new and effective antibiotic.