Fungus Farmers Show Way To New Drugs

摘要

In a mutually beneficial symbiosis, leaf-cutting ants cultivate fungus gardens, providing both a safe home for the fungi and a food source for the ants. But this 50-million-year-old relationship also includes microbes that new research shows could help speed the quest to develop better antibiotics and biofuels.rnTen years ago, Cameron Currie, a microbial ecologist then at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, discovered that leaf-cutting ants carry colonies of actinomycete bacteria on their bodies (C. R. Currie et al. Nature 398, 701-704; 1999). The bacteria churn out an antibiotic that protects the ants' fungal crops fromrnassociated parasitic fungi (such as Escovopsis). On 29 March, Currie, Jon Clardy at the Harvard Medical School in Boston and their colleagues reported that they had isolated and purified one of these antifungals, which they namedrndentigerumycin, and that it is a chemical that has never been previously reported (D.-C. Oh et al. Nature Chem. Bio. doi: 10.1038chem-bio.159; 2009). The antifungal slowed the growth of a drug-resistant strain of the fungus Candida albicans, which causes yeast infections in people.