Bear Saliva to Rapidly Test for Antibiotics: Super-Fast Screening Technology Could Help to Discover New Treatments

“It is tedious to look for bacteria that produce antibiotics by testing them on Petri dishes and looking at how they inhibit the growth of harmful bacteria,” said study coauthor Konstantin Severinov, a principal investigator at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology and professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. “We swiftly determined the spectrum of the antibiotic activity in saliva from a Siberian bear.”

The bear was caught wild and then released. The technology used powerful machines to rapidly sort several hundred thousand oil droplets with bacteria from the bear’s mouth, and the scientists found one droplet with zero Staphylococcus aureus. The beneficial strain of bacteria that killed Staphylococcus aureus produces a previously known antibiotic – amicoumacin.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) resists several antibiotics and can cause pneumonia and sepsis, a life-threatening reaction to severe infection in the body, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The bear was chosen largely because it was captured way out in the wilderness where, it was assumed, microbes typical for the species and not affected by civilization are present,” Severinov said. “The latter consideration is important since studies show that the diversity of microbiota depends on diet and decreases dramatically, for example, in zoo-kept animals or urban humans compared with people from indigenous tribes.

“Placing single species of bacteria in droplets allows us to monitor their responses to various insults, such as antibiotics, while avoiding interactions in complex microbiomes, such as our own. Our method should allow us to test how our microbiome responds and changes when various drugs are administered.”

Contacts and sources:
Rutgers University-New Brunswick

Citation: ltrahigh-throughput functional profiling of microbiota communities
Stanislav S. Terekhov, Ivan V. Smirnov, Maja V. Malakhova, Andrei E. Samoilov, Alexander I. Manolov, Anton S. Nazarov, Dmitry V. Danilov, Svetlana A. Dubiley, Ilya A. Osterman, Maria P. Rubtsova, Elena S. Kostryukova, Rustam H. Ziganshin, Maria A. Kornienko, Anna A. Vanyushkina, Olga N. Bukato, Elena N. Ilina, Valentin V. Vlasov, Konstantin V. Severinov, Alexander G. Gabibov, and Sidney Altman PNAS   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1811250115