Contact: Ellen Bank
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Dec. 21, 2005
CHARLESTON - Major progress has been made in the understanding of the propagation of drug resistance plasmids that cause emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria that are a major public health problem.
Results of research by Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) researchers will be published Dec. 22 in the prestigious journal Molecular Cell.
Deepak Bastia, Ph.D., Donnelley Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and his associate, Shamsu Zzaman, Ph.D., have succeeded in propagating the plasmid (that is a small, self replicating circular double stranded DNA that carries the drug resistance genes and multiplies inside bacterial cells) in a purified system of proteins and cofactors in the test tube. They have shown that long-range interaction of two widely spaced regions of DNA controls the propagation of the drug resistance plasmids.
"With many bacteria becoming rapidly resistant to all available antibiotics, other drugs developed from the knowledge of the mechanism of duplication of the plasmids will be essential to kill antibiotic resistance plasmids," said Bastia. "Our fundamental work on the mechanism of duplication of the plasmids is a stepping stone to the development of effective drugs to treat a wide variety of bacterial infections."
This is the first paper from MUSC published in this prestigious journal.
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