Analysis of fungi collected from peat bogs has identified several species that produce toxins for the bacteria that cause the human disease tuberculosis. The findings suggest that a promising direction for developing higher treatments could also be to focus on biological processes within the bacterium that help maintain levels of compounds often known as thiols. Neha Malhotra of the National Institutes of Health, US, and her colleagues presented the findings on December 3 in an open-access journal.
Every yr, tens of millions of individuals all over the world change into sick with tuberculosis and a couple of million people die, despite the incontrovertible fact that the disease is treatable and curable. However, treatment requires every day antibiotics for months, which might pose significant challenges, so recent treatments that shorten the duration of treatment are urgently needed.
To explore potential targets for treatment-shortening strategies, Malhotra and colleagues turned to Sphagnum peat bogs. These freshwater wetlands harbor abundant species of bacteria within the genus — the identical genus because the bacteria that cause tuberculosis. In these bogs, fungi compete with mycobacteria to grow inside a decaying “gray layer” that's acidic, nutrient-poor, and oxygen-poor, just like the lesions present in the lungs of tuberculosis patients.
In the lab, the researchers identified each of the roughly 1,500 species of fungi collected from the grey layer of several peat bogs within the northeastern United States, in addition to five fungi that had toxic effects against the bacterium. Further laboratory experiments narrowed down these effects to a few different substances produced by different fungi: patulin, citrinin, and ndolalin A.
Each of the three compounds exerts its toxic effects on the tubercle bacterium by severely disrupting the cellular surface of a category of compounds called thiols—a lot of which play essential roles in molecular processes. which help keep bacterial cells alive and lively.
The researchers note that these three compounds are unlikely to be good drug candidates by themselves. However, especially given the similarities between the peat bathroom environment and tuberculosis lesions, the outcomes provide support for a particular strategy for the event of treatment-shortening drugs: targeting the biological processes that cause tuberculosis. maintain thiol levels within the germ.
The authors added, “Pathogenic mycobacteria, such as those that cause the human diseases leprosy and tuberculosis, are abundant in Sphagnum peat bogs where the acidic, hypoxic and nutrient-poor environment creates intense microbial competition. screened for those that directly competed with mycobacteria by co-culture and discovered that these fungi all target the same physiological processes in mycobacteria. using several chemically distinct mechanisms.”