AlphaFold unlocks a decade of knowledge inside minutes that may assist beat antibiotic resistance
Most individuals who’ve entry to a contemporary healthcare system wouldn’t contemplate a illness like bubonic plague to be a risk. Such bacterial infections are often handled simply by means of trendy antibiotics. But antibiotic resistance, the place micro organism evolve the flexibility to defeat these medicine, is rapidly turning into a worldwide drawback. With new antibiotics skinny on the bottom, scientists like Marcelo Sousa and Megan Mitchell on the College of Colorado Boulder are a unique method: focusing on the resistance mechanism itself.
Blocking the resistance mechanism, which is managed by enzymes, ought to enable current antibiotics to proceed to operate. However understanding the construction of those enzymes has confirmed extremely difficult with purely experimental strategies – till the group got here throughout AlphaFold. Within the video above, Marcelo and Megan clarify the way it felt to instantly unlock the potential of these information, and what this might imply for antibiotic resistance.
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