Human digestive enzymes are expected to help fight resistant bacteria

December 11, 2023

Xinhua News Agency, Washington, August 20 - US and Italian researchers said on the 20th that a digestive enzyme in the human stomach can be used to develop a new type of antibiotic that can treat resistant bacterial infections and help curb growing bacterial resistance. Pharmacological problems.

The body produces many antimicrobial peptides that help the immune system fight bacterial infections, but these peptides are often not sufficient for their own use as antibiotics. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Naples, Federico II, believe that in addition to antimicrobial peptides, other proteins in the human body may also be used for sterilization, and a search algorithm has been developed for this purpose in humans. Protein sequences similar to known antibacterial peptide structures are sought in the protein sequence database.

Published in a new issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Synthetic Biology, the algorithm searches for nearly 2,000 human proteins, finds 800 proteins that may have antibacterial capabilities, and ultimately locks the stomach secreted by the parietal cells. Proproteinase. This protein is mixed with stomach acid and converted to pepsin A and other small fragments. Pepsin A can digest food, while other small fragments have not previously been known to function.

The researchers found that these small fragments can kill a variety of bacteria cultured in culture dishes, including foodborne pathogens such as Salmonella and Escherichia coli, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which can infect the lungs of patients with cystic fibrosis, and resemble the stomach. Both the acidic environment and the neutral environment show a bactericidal effect.

One of the authors, MIT researcher Cesar Drafuente-Nunez, said that human stomachs are attacked by a variety of pathogenic bacteria, and it is meaningful to have a defense mechanism against these attacks. The researchers hope that this discovery will help develop new antibiotics for the treatment of resistant bacterial infections. (Reporter Zhou Zhou)

Source: Xinhuanet

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