School of Life Science, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China.
Department of Microbiology, Faculty of Health Sciences, Hazara University, Mansehra, Pakistan.
Appl Microbiol Biotechnol. 2018 Sep;102(17):7333-7341. doi: 10.1007/s00253-018-9193-0. Epub 2018 Jul 5.
Antibiotics had been a useful tool for treating bacterial infections since their discovery, but with the passage of time, the evolution of resistance among microbes against antibiotics has rendered them useless. Many approaches are being used to tackle this problem which include discovery of new antibiotics, modification of the existing ones, and elucidating mechanisms of resistance in microbes for a better understanding. In this review, we have discussed that discovery of new antibiotics is a basic need to fight emerging infectious bacteria, and for this purpose, we should target those microbes from the environment which are not easily culturable. For this purpose, culturing technique should be modified to the in situ culturing as nutritional requirements of unculturable bacteria are unknown. Two different cultivation strategies, diffusion chambers and iChip technology, have been reviewed for their excellent improvement in culturing compared to conventional techniques. Since co-culture is also an important factor which can result in exploring new microbial diversity, we hypothesize that if iChip and co-culture can be combined in a single device, it can allow production of novel antibiotics from those bacteria which are difficult to be cultured in the future.
抗生素自发现以来一直是治疗细菌感染的有用工具，但随着时间的推移，微生物对抗生素的耐药性进化已经使它们变得无用。许多方法正在被用来解决这个问题，包括发现新的抗生素、对现有抗生素进行修饰，以及阐明微生物的耐药机制以更好地理解。在这篇综述中，我们讨论了发现新的抗生素是对抗新兴传染病细菌的基本需求，为此，我们应该从环境中寻找那些不易培养的微生物作为目标。为此，培养技术应该修改为原位培养，因为无法培养的细菌的营养需求是未知的。我们对扩散室和 iChip 技术这两种不同的培养策略进行了回顾，因为它们在培养方面比传统技术有了显著的改进。由于共培养也是一个可以探索新微生物多样性的重要因素，我们假设如果 iChip 和共培养可以结合在一个单一的设备中，它可以允许从那些未来难以培养的细菌中生产新的抗生素。
