I saw an interesting article published yesterday ( phys.org/news/2014-11-antibiotic-mushroom-horse-dung.html ) about on an entirely new class of antibiotics found in Coprinopsis cinerea, and looked for a medicinal mushroom group to discuss it in. I couldnt find any, so I created one: https://facebook/groups/1587063431513159/ The molecule - named copsin - is really different than all of the known antibiotics in that it is a protein. This really interesting - there must be a whole lot of new antibiotics hiding in mushrooms. Testing random mushrooms for antibiotics is a relatively unexplored area - Coprinopsis cinerea is a standard fungus used in the lab for many things, its amazing that this went undiscoverd for so long. It is so well studied that it is one of the fungi for which the full genome is available. Almost every mushroom in the world has been studied far less - there must be many more antibiotics lurking in common and rare mushroom species. Testing mushrooms for antibiotics is also something that is easy to do at home - just grow some bacteria on agar and apply mushroom extract. It has never been easier to do groundbreaking research in a spare room that could potentially save a lot of lives. New antibiotics are very much needed due to antibiotic resistance - In the USA alone, 23,000 people a year die from antibiotic resistant bacterial infections. Its interesting that this was discovered in a dung mushroom - perhaps dung is high in bacteria and this gives an advantage to mushrooms that evolve antibiotics. Testing other dung mushrooms is likely to reveal more new antibiotics. Coprinopsis cinerea is really easy to grow - we should start looking for cultures and spores of this and other closely related fungi. To find other species closely related to Coprinopsis cinerea, try this BLAST search: blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?PAGE=Nucleotides&PROGRAM=blastn&QUERY=JN943128.1&DATABASE=nr&MEGABLAST=on&BLAST_PROGRAMS=megaBlast&LINK_LOC=nuccore&PAGE_TYPE=BlastSearch
Posted on: Sat, 08 Nov 2014 16:50:55 +0000
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