Los Alamos National Laboratory Understanding molecular processes can improve the antibiotics and vaccines that fight disease
A first-ever, atom-by-atom supercomputer simulation shows how antibiotics kill bacteria and illustrates other processes of the molecular machinery in living cells. The research opens fresh pathways to improving antibiotics, designing new ones to fight drug-resistant bacteria and developing vaccines for viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19.
“The ribosome is the central information-processing molecular machine in all life forms. It has to decipher information about accepting correct amino acids and rejecting incorrect amino acids for building proteins in the cell,” said Karissa Sanbonmatsu, a structural biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Sanbonmatsu is coauthor of a new paper about the breakthrough simulation published in Nature Communications.
“Using the supercomputers at Los Alamos, we’re able to image this process atom for atom and show how antibiotics affect that process,” Sanbonmatsu said. “Studies like these are critical for combatting the emerging crisis of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.”
“Antimicrobial resistance is on the rise due to overuse in medicine and agriculture,” said Dylan Girodat, first author of the paper, who developed the project with Sanbonmatsu. Now an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas, Girodat was a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos when he and Sanbonmatsu performed the research. “To combat antimicrobial resistance, we must understand how conventional antibiotics work if we want to develop novel ones.”