In 2008, Michael Goodfellow, a scientist at Newcastle University, was handed a soil sample taken from Chile's Atacama Desert—the world's driest desert, once considered a dead zone. "Quite frankly, we didn't expect to isolate（使分离）anything, " Goodfellow admits. But to his surprise, he was able to grow a diversity of bacteria from the sample.
A 2018 review counted a total of 46 new molecules(分子)that have been isolated from the Atacama bacteria so far, many of which show antibiotic(抗菌的), antiviral or anticancer properties(特征). It was the type of bacteria living in the Atacama that proved particularly exciting: actinobacteria(放线菌).
Take streptomyces griseus for example, a species of actinobacteria you might find in soil. A sample of streptomyces, when placed among mycobacterium tuberculosis( 结核杆菌), will release a chemical which stops its bacterial neighbors from growing the proteins they need to survive. When scientists at Rutgers University managed to isolate this chemical in 1944, they accidentally found the first antibiotic treatment for tuberculosis, saving countless lives.
Today, there is general agreement on the need for the development of new antibiotics because our most trusted drugs began to fail—bacteria have learnt how to survive our antibiotic attacks. Sometimes, a potentially useful chemical can be found right in environments around us. But many scientists argue that we should also be exploring the natural world for novel bio-chemistry, an approach known as "bioprospecting".
"70% to 75% of all antibiotics come from nature, " notes MarcelJaspars, a natural product chemist
at the University of Aberdeen. "It strikes me that we should be looking more deeply into how nature makes these molecules and how we can actually find antibiotics. "
