Research by scientists collaborating with Bio Nano Consulting into the workings of vancomycin has been published in Nature Nanotechnology (October 2008).
Vancomycin is one of the few antibiotics that can be used to combat increasingly resistant infections such as MRSA.
The researchers, led by Dr Rachel McKendry and Professor Gabriel Aeppli at the London Centre for Nanotechnology, developed novel, ultra-sensitive nanomechanical probes capable of providing new insight into how antibiotics work, paving the way for the development of more effective new drugs.
During the study McKendry, Joseph Ndieyira, Moyu Watari and coworkers used cantilever arrays - tiny levers no wider than a human hair - to examine the process that ordinarily takes place in the body when vancomycin binds itself to the surface of the bacteria.
They coated the cantilever array with mucopeptides from bacterial cell walls and found that as the antibiotic attaches itself, it generates a surface stress on the bacteria, which can be detected by a tiny bending of the levers.
The team suggests that this stress contributes to the disruption of the cell walls and the breakdown of the bacteria.
The interdisciplinary team went on to compare how vancomycin interacts with both non-resistant and resistant strains of bacteria.
The 'superbugs' are resistant to antibiotics because of a simple mutation that deletes a single hydrogen bond from the structure of their cell walls.
This small change makes it approximately 1,000 times harder for the antibiotic to attach itself to the bug, leaving it much less able to disrupt the cells' structure, and therefore therapeutically ineffective.
