How does Penicillin work?

Even though Penicillin has been the go to antibiotic for almost a century, scientists still don’t understand how the drug works. Resistance against penicillin has been emerging over the recent decades and new antibiotics need to be found. However, Thomas Bernhardt who is an associate professor of microbiology and immunobiology at Harvard Medical school have found out how penicillin attacks bacteria which can lead to new ways to prevent drug resistance. They found that penicillin not only block cell-wall assembly, but it sets in motion a toxic malfunctioning of the machinery to prevents the cell from producing a cell wall causing the cells to die because they don’t have the resources they need to survive.

In order to determine how penicillin and other similar drugs that are called beta-lactams that are naturally derived from antibiotics produced by fungi that evolved effective ways to kill bacteria, the researchers at Harvard used a specific derivative of penicillin that targets one enzyme in cell-wall assembly. They found that the cell was still killed by the penicillin that was targeting the nonessential enzyme. Therefore, the enzyme could be removed from the cells completely without harm, because if the enzymes were present, the cell would die. The enzyme that fights back against the beta-lactam is called beta-lactamases that slice the beta-lactam molecules and keep them from attaching to their targets to resist penicillin. Since this research has allowed the scientists to learn more about beta-lactams they will be able to find new ways to disrupt it in the future.

I found this article interesting because I am always getting sick and I have been on several antibiotics and I never understood how they worked. After reading this article, I see that scientists also didn’t know much about how they work either.

This Article : Penicillin tactics revealed by scientists