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There’s nothing more exciting to scientists than when they find something they believe is going to change an industry, and that appears to be what's happened in the Arctic.
When researchers went searching down at the bottom on the Arctic Ocean, they were ecstatic to find something that has the potential to revolutionise our healthcare system.
After finding a cache down in the sea, scientists now think they’ve hit the jackpot which could help antibiotic trials.
This ‘promising’ find could mean that deadly viruses might be able to be treated in the future.
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As antibiotics help to keep us safe from illnesses which could kill us all off without a hearty dose of pills, it’s pretty necessary that a constant stock of them are available worldwide.
If not, we could all be wiped out for something as daft as the flu, and that’s already happened in history.
But now that superbugs are able to bypass our antibiotics, it means that this could become a reality again.
So, why could this Arctic find be so great for our health?
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Well, what researchers found are ‘promising’ antibiotic candidates in deep-sea microbes that could combat those viruses.
We all know that antibiotic resistance is a thing for us humans, but it seems like it’s slowly becoming a thing for diseases too.
So, this new antibiotic source could help defend us for a little while longer.
Even though around 70 percent of our antibiotics come from actinobacteria found in soil, we’ve yet to go searching for other sources that could be hiding in all sorts of places all over the world.
Study lead Professor Päivi Tammela, from the University of Helsinki, Finland, said: "We show how advanced screening assays can identify anti-virulence and antibacterial metabolites from actinobacteria extracts.
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"We discovered a compound that inhibits enteropathogenic E. coli (EPEC) virulence without affecting its growth, and a growth-inhibiting compound, both in actinobacteria from the Arctic Ocean."
This could mean that the antibiotic could dial down the nastiness of the bug, without messing up our bodies in the process.
Prof Tammela and her team are now focusing on the EPEC strain to test out the potential sea antibiotic as it is an awful bug which causes diarrhoea in kids under five.
The strain leaches off the gut, and injects 'virulence factors' which take over cells and kills them.
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When researchers took samples of four types of actinobacteria which came from invertebrates in the Arctic Ocean in 2020, they decided to grow it and see what would happen if they put it up against the EPEC.
They found that the bacteria were able to hold its own, making it a real contender for medicine.
Prof Tammela explained: "The next steps are the optimisation of the culture conditions for compound production and the isolation of sufficient amounts of each compound to elucidate their respective structures and further investigate their respective bioactivities."
The study has been published in the Frontiers in Microbiology journal.
Britt Jones