AlphaFold Unlocks a Decade of Data in Minutes, Could Facilitate Beat Antibiotic Resistance
Most people with access to a current health care system wouldn’t consider a disease like the bubonic plague a threat. Such bacterial infections are usually easily treated with current antibiotics. But antibiotic resistance, in which bacteria develop the ability to defeat these drugs, is brisk becoming a global problem. With fresh antibiotics in tiny supply, scientists like Marcelo Sousa and Megan Mitchell of the University of Colorado Boulder are looking for a different approach: targeting the mechanism of resistance itself.
Blocking the enzyme-controlled resistance mechanism should allow existing antibiotics to continue working. But understanding the structure of these enzymes has proven incredibly challenging using purely experimental methods—until the team stumbled upon AlphaFold. In the video above, Marcelo and Megan explain how they felt when they suddenly unlocked the power of this data, and what it could mean for antibiotic resistance.
Links and further reading: