Impact
Accelerating the race against antibiotic resistance
AlphaFold unlocks a decade of data within minutes that can help beat antibiotic resistance
Most people who have access to a modern healthcare system would not consider a disease like bubonic plague to be a threat. Such bacterial infections are usually dealt with easily through modern antibiotics. Yet antibiotic resistance, where bacteria evolve the ability to defeat these drugs, is quickly becoming a global problem. With new antibiotics thin on the ground, scientists like Marcelo Sousa and Megan Mitchell at the University of Colorado Boulder are looking at a different approach: targeting the resistance mechanism itself.
Watch
With modern medicine and modern antibiotics, we kind of take it for granted that we’re not going to die of a bacterial infection. But there’s 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections in the United States alone – it’s pretty scary.
Megan Mitchell, biochemist
Blocking the resistance mechanism, which is controlled by enzymes, should allow existing antibiotics to continue to function. But understanding the structure of these enzymes has proven incredibly challenging with purely experimental methods – until the team came across AlphaFold. In the video above, Marcelo and Megan explain how it felt to suddenly unlock the potential of those data, and what this could mean for antibiotic resistance.
Links and further reading:
- Find out more about the Sousa Research Group at the University of Colorado Boulder
- Find these complex enzymes here on the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database
