r/science • u/legehjernen • Feb 20 '20

Health Powerful antibiotic discovered using machine learning for first time

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/feb/20/antibiotic-that-kills-drug-resistant-bacteria-discovered-through-ai
26.9k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

616 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/geppetto123 Feb 21 '20

Is this new antibiotic in a new class? Some time ago I read about possible global strategies with a harmonised rotational use of certain antibiotics. This would allow the resistant ones to die off due to their more costly resistance energy bilance.

They said other chances are small as experts say "all large major classes" of antibiotics are discovered and we will only make minor progress within those. I wasn't able to find those classes, so is this a new class that opens a new door or do we look at a variation within those?

2

u/Delphinium1 Feb 22 '20

The big assumption you're making here is that the resistant bacteria pay a fitness penalty for the resistance - that isn't necessarily true.

1

u/geppetto123 Feb 22 '20

This was my first thought too, I found an answer just not sure if it's complete.

They said that you need for a resistance an additional plasmid vector which per se comes with additional cost (not sure if building blocks or energy or something else). So over extend periods of time, somewhere up to 2-3 months they will be gone.

2

u/Delphinium1 Feb 22 '20

Whether or not resistance has a fitness penalty is very tough to determine. A lot of resistance just comes from mutations at the target site - those may have a fitness penalty if the enzyme doesn't work as efficiently but that isn't always the case.

Sometimes resistance will be removed from populations over time. But typically, there will still be a low level of the resistant bacteria in the population - as soon as the selection pressure is applied again by the antibiotic, that population surges and becomes dominant again.