Newswise — Most of us take for granted that our kids will make it to their fifth birthday, but nearly half a million children worldwide who are infected by Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria each year never make it that far.
Spread in droplets when we cough or sneeze, the bacteria can cause deadly pneumonia, meningitis and sepsis, as well as inner ear infections that leave children deaf. And they’re rapidly developing resistance to antibiotic treatments.
Now, University of Melbourne researchers and their colleagues have taken a step toward a new therapeutic strategy. Working in part at the DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, they determined the structure of a molecule that helps S. pneumoniae take up manganese, a mineral that’s essential to its survival. The findings could aid the design of new drugs to target the molecule and deny the bacteria its manganese supply.
“Knowing the structure is the first step to developing a drug or therapy against S. pneumoniae,” said Christopher McDevitt, a microbiologist and biochemist at the University of Melbourne and one of the study’s senior authors. “Our approach would be to block this pathway and prevent the transporter bringing manganese into the bacterium.”
How to starve a pathogen
The idea of preventing S. pneumoniae from taking up manganese emerged more than a decade ago when McDevitt and fellow Melbourne biochemist Megan Maher decided to follow up on an important clue. They knew that zinc was toxic to S. pneumoniae...
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