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Breaking through: How researchers are gaining entry into barricaded bacteria

Nature Medicine volume 23, pages 907–910 (2017)Cite this article

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A Correction to this article was published on 01 September 2017

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Typically when she applied the antibiotic vancomycin to E. coli, the microbes remained unaffected and continued to multiply in the dish. But when she applied the same antibiotic to a strain that had been genetically modified to possess a large pore in its outer cell membrane, the drug had a dramatic effect. “Suddenly, we see this huge killing zone,” Zgurskaya recalls. Without the presence of this pore, vancomycin would be unable to get in through the outer membranes of the bacteria. “That moment,” Zgurskaya says, “when I was able to see just what was preventing the antibiotic from getting in was pretty good.”

Of the bacteria that pose the most problems when it comes to allowing antibiotics entry, Gram-negative bacteria, the group to which E. coli belongs, is at the top of the list. In February this year, the World Health Organization (WHO) published a list of 12 families of bacteria for which antibacterials are “urgently needed.” Of these, nine are Gram-negative. One species on the list, Klebsiella pneumoniae, is already resistant to a group of last-resort antibiotics known as carbapenems. The carbapenem-resistant strains of the bacteria have spread to all regions of the world, according to the WHO.

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Change history

  • 23 August 2017

    In the August 2017 issue, the story “Breaking through: How researchers are gaining entry into barricaded bacteria” (Nat. Med. 23, 907–910, 2017) misstated that the pharmaceutical company Achaogen would be filing a New Drug Application with the FDA in 2018. The company will be filing an Investigational New Drug application. The article was also unclear in wording the progress of siderophore-conjugated antibiotics. Such antibiotics have made it to clinical trials, but none so far have made it to market. The errors have been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article as of 23 August 2017.

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  1. Shraddha Chakradhar is Nature Medicine's associate news editor in Boston.

    • Shraddha Chakradhar
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  1. Shraddha Chakradhar
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Chakradhar, S. Breaking through: How researchers are gaining entry into barricaded bacteria. Nat Med 23, 907–910 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm0817-907

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