News from the John Innes Centre

  The enthusiasm of a school biology teacher helped fuel Professor Mervyn Bibb’s own curiosity. Today, as antibiotic resistance nears a crisis point, his work to understand how soil bacteria produce antibiotics is more vital than ever. What sparked your interest in science? I have always been interested in the “natural world”, but it was [...]

JIC’s molecular microbiology department has recruited a new project leader. Dr Barrie Wilkinson joins JIC from Cambridge drug discovery company Biotica, where he was vice president for research. The importance of the department’s research was highlighted recently when the UK chief medical officer Professor Sally Davies warned of the ‘catastrophic threat” of antimicrobial resistance. She [...]

A compound from the South African toothbrush tree inactivates a drug target for tuberculosis in a previously unseen way. Tuberculosis causes more deaths worldwide than any other infectious disease. At the same time as rates are increasing, resistance strains are emerging due, in part, to non-compliance with the treatment required. Current drugs are nearly 50 [...]

A new project is investigating whether altering the production of an antibiotic will remove side effects preventing it being used clinically to battle drug-resistant superbugs. Tunicamycin is an antibiotic produced by the soil bacterium Streptomyces that was discovered 40 years ago. It works by blocking cell wall production in bacteria in a clinically novel way, [...]

A novel way of increasing the amounts of antibiotics produced by bacteria has been discovered that could markedly improve the yields of these important compounds in commercial production. It could also be valuable in helping to discover new compounds. With the ever-growing threat from antibiotic resistance, these tools will be very useful in ensuring that [...]

Working out the structure of a complex formed when a protein binds to DNA has proved to be key in understanding how an antibiotic-producing organism controls resistance to its own antibiotic, and may be an example of how other antibiotic producers regulate export to prevent self-toxicity. The natural production of antibiotics by certain microorganisms is [...]

Scientists researching a new antibiotic have pieced together the way it is produced by a soil bacterium by working out the functions of its genes. Microbisporicin is produced by a soil bacterium from Indonesia called Microbispora corallina. A clearer understanding of how microbisporicin’s synthesis is regulated by the bacterium will provide the basis for finding [...]

Procarta press release Procarta, a spin-out company from John Innes Centre science, has secured up to £1.25million funding to continue the development of its novel DNA-based antibiotic technology to help combat drug-resistant infections. Procarta Biosystems Ltd., which is developing a novel class of DNA-based antibiotics capable of tackling drug-resistant infections, announced today a round of [...]