Due to increasing antibiotic resistance in pathogens causing infections, the development of new antibacterial substances is important. Hopes are pinned on a new group of substances produced by gram-positive bacteria, the lantibiotics. These are antimicrobial peptides that often have a very narrow spectrum of activity. "Such compounds are highly interesting from a medical point of view, as they could specifically attack individual groups of organisms without affecting the entire bacterial flora, as is the case with broad-spectrum antibiotics, for example," says corresponding author Dr. Fabian Grein, until recently head of the DZIF research group "Bacterial Interference" at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Microbiology at the UKB and member of the Transdisciplinary Research Area (TRA) "Life & Health" at the University of Bonn.
"This specificity is presumably mediated by a very special mechanism of action that we were able to decipher in detail," says Grein. Epilancin A37 penetrates the corynebacterial cell, initially without destroying it. The antimicrobial peptides accumulate in the cell and then dissolve the cell membrane from the inside, thus killing the corynebacterium. Co-author Dr. Thomas Fließwasser from the Institute of Pharmaceutical Microbiology at the UKB, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bonn and acting head of the DZIF research group "Bacterial Interference" adds: "Our study shows how a specific mechanism of action can be used to specifically combat a single bacterial species. It therefore serves us as a ’proof of concept’".