Staphylococcus aureus discovery

Figure 1.14. The very petri dish that sparked the discovery of penicillin. The white blob at the bottom is a colony of Penicillium notatum contaminating a plate streaked with Staphylococcus aureus (small, circular colonies). The penicillin diffusing from the fungus radially into the agar has killed off the bacterial colonies in its vicinity.

Perhaps the most well known observation in the history of drug development is Alexander Fleming s chance observation in 1928 that colonies of the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus died when they were adjacent to colonies of the mold Penicillium notatum. Spores of the mold had landed accidentally on plates growing the bacteria. Fleming soon realized that the mold produced a substance that could kill disease-causing bacteria. This discovery led to a fundamentally new approach to the treatment of bacterial infections. Howard Florey and Ernest Chain developed a powdered form of the substance, termed penicillin, that became a widely used antibiotic in the 1940s. 

As a result, one of mankind s greatest discoveries, which has saved up to the present the lives of more than 100 million people, occurred only by chance not until 1928 - through the carelessness ofthe Scottish pharmacologist Alexander Fleming (Fig. 5.24). A fungal spore had contaminated an unattended and almost discarded culture of Staphylococcus aureus in a Petri dish, and had created a zone of inhibition to bacterial growth. 

Concerning antibacterial agents, infections caused by methiciUin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) are a serious concern, as MRSA has become broadly resistant to many classes of antibiotics. The recent discovery... 

Nicolaou, K.C. et al.. Discovery of novel antibacterial agents active against methiciUin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus from combinatorial benzopyran hbraries, Chembiochem, 460, 2001. 

Nicolaou, K.C. et al.. Discovery of novel antibacterial agents active against methiciUin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus from combinatorial benzopyran libraries, ChemBioChem., 2, 460, 2001. Nicolaou, K.C. et al.. Discovery and optimization of non-steroidal FXR agonists from natural productlike libraries, Org. Biomol. Chem., 1, 908, 2003. 

Quinoa, E. and Crews, P, Phenohc constituents of Psammaplysilla, Tetrahedron Lett., 28,3229, 1987. Nicolaou, K.C. et al, Combinatorial synthesis through disulfide exchange discovery of potent psam-maplin A type antibacterial agents active against methiciUin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), Chem. Eur. J., 7, 4280, 2001. 

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