3 Comments

Quick, Who Dis­cov­ered An­tibi­otics?

by Elio

If your an­swer is Alexan­der Flem­ing or Sel­man Wax­man, you would be off by about 50 mil­lion years.

Bee­wolf with prey. Source

The an­swer is in­sects. There are ants and wasps that cul­tivate an­tibi­otic pro­duc­ing bac­te­ria and use them to pre­serve their caches of food. The clas­sic ex­am­ple is the leaf-cut­ting ants which feed on fungi they cul­ti­vate on the well-chewed veg­etable mat­ter they bring to their nest.  Well-chewed bits of leaves and flow­ers should, by rights, be the per­fect sub­strate for the growth of all kinds of fungi. Not so. Only the one fun­gus that the ants pre­fer makes it. Other fungi are in­hib­ited by an an­ti­fun­gal an­tibiotic made by bac­te­ria that the ants carry on their cu­ticle.

Now a new story (link up­dated in 2014) has emerged. A wasp, the Eu­ro­pean bee­wolf, har­bors an­ti­fun­gal-pro­duc­ing bac­te­ria in the glands of their an­ten­nae and use them to in­oc­u­late their nests, thus pro­tect­ing their young from in­fec­tion.

In other words, by the time mam­mals ap­peared on earth, ants and wasps were al­ready us­ing an­tibiotics.

 

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3 Comments
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Alan Dove
19 years ago

I'll be quite sur­prised if we don't find a sim­i­lar phe­nom­e­non in even older branches of the tree of life, par­tic­u­larly ma­rine or­gan­isms. Every­thing from sponges to shrimp has to sur­vive in a bath of bac­te­ria and pro­to­zoa.
You are so right. A good ex­am­ple are sponges. For an ex­am­ple of work in Aus­tralia, see http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/health/HealthRepublish_195275.htm
Elio

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Ford
19 years ago

The an­tibi­otics Flem­ing dis­cov­ered were in­vented by fungi, right? What was the first an­tibi­otic ac­tu­ally in­vented by hu­mans?
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Elio says: Do you mean a syn­thetic one? If so, I'd say sul­fanil­amide (Do­magk, 1935)

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rod sobieski
19 years ago

Trick ques­tion? Hu­mans do make an­timi­cro­bials such as lacto­fer­rin, but do you mean to ask who dis­cov­ered the the first chemother­a­peu­tic against a dis­ease?
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Elio's re­sponse: In usual par­lance, chem­i­cals that are part of our in­nate im­mu­nity are not re­ferred to as an­tibi­otics. This term, as I have seen it used, is lim­ited to ex­tra­ne­ous chem­i­cals, nat­ural or man-made. The dis­tinc­tion is one of us­age.

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