Technology is at it once again and this time has improved the quest for new antibiotics. A team of computer scientists developed an algorithm that can quickly search databases to uncover variants of known antibiotics. The study was published yesterday in Nature Microbiology and may contribute to the fight against antibiotic resistance.
The name of their algorithm is VarQuest and according to the authors has identified 10 times more variants of peptidic natural products (PNPs) than all previous PNP discovery efforts combined.
"Our results show that the antibiotics produced by microbes are much more diverse than had been assumed," said Hosein Mohimani, assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Computational Biology Department.
Many PNPs are included in the so-called "antibiotics of last resort" and there are rising concerns about antibiotic drug resistance. With VarQeust, researchers can find more effective variants of known antibiotics and the clinical efficacy of antibiotic drugs can be preserved.
Recently, researchers launched the Global Natural Products Social (GNPS) molecular network, which is a database of mass spectra of natural products collected by researchers worldwide and there is already more than a billion mass spectra. Mohimani notes that the VarQuest algorithm can contribute to GNPS with the novel variants it is capable of unveiling.
"Natural product discovery is turning into a Big Data territory, and the field has to prepare for this transformation in terms of collecting, storing and making sense of Big Data," Mohimani said. "VarQuest is the first step toward digesting the Big Data already collected by the community."