The Microbiome as a Source of Antibiotics

September 12, 2014 | While the human microbiome has been mined as a source of novel therapies for years — through probiotics or fecal transplantation — a team at UC San Francisco is now exploring whether more traditional drugs could be found in the arsenals of our commensal bacteria. With a computer program that searches microbial metagenomes for genes predicted to code for druglike molecules, Michael Fischbach and colleagues have already turned up an antibiotic produced by a human vaginal bacterium, which in the lab can kill pathogens like Staphylococcus aureus. Nature News