Finding new antibiotics has also been scientifically difficult.
Bacteria found in things like bread mold make their own antibiotics, which they use as chemical weapons to kill rival germs. For 70 years, researchers have used this microscopic arms race to fight infections in humans.
Although dirt is filled with germs, scientists until now haven’t been able to grow these bacteria in a laboratory – a key requirement for studying and testing them. Scientists were able to coax only about 1% of soil bacteria to grow in a lab dish.
Now, scientists led by Northeastern University in Boston have invented a “contraption” to grow germs that could allow them to study about half of soil bacteria, vastly increasing the pool of drug candidates, according to researcher Kim Lewis, coauthor of a study published in Nature.
