As the University of Connecticut bluntly puts it – we’re running out of antibiotics and people are dying because of it. That’s the driving force behind a worldwide academic collaborative project to discover new antibiotics in soil.
The “Microbe Hunting: Crowdsourcing the Discovery of New Antibiotics” class at UConn is part of a global collaboration between students and microbiologists at 109 schools in 32 U.S. states plus Puerto Rico, and eight other countries. It’s called the “Small World Initiative.”
“The grand goal is to find new antibiotics,” says assistant professor of molecular and cell biology Nichole Broderick. As a UConn Today article points out, soil mining for antibiotics might sound novel but is a traditional approach. Penicillin was first discovered in mold that contaminated some lab samples.
The issue is especially crucial because antibiotics can quickly be rendered ineffectual. Since the mid-’80s, new antibiotic discovery has plummeted. Pharmaceutical companies don’t find antibiotics a profitable line of research, as it can take a decade to find and test a single drug to the FDA’s satisfaction, but just months for resistance to appear.
