How Are Bacteria And Fungi Used To Make Drugs And Treatments For Disease?
One straight clue is ANTIBIOTICS!right?
first age of antibiotics were directly produced by fungi and bacteria,let me name them for you :
Streptomyces:is the producer of 80% of antibiotics like Streptomycin,tetracyclin,Gentamicin,Erit…
Penecillium produces penecillin
Bacillus produce Polymixin,Basitracin,…
that’s not enough,while growing they also makes some proteins and enzymes that can be useful
i concur with juicebox, but as an appendix:
fungi are also suseptible to bacterial attack, like we are. When flemming discovered penicilin, he did so because the fungus was competing with staph aureus on the plate, and so released its toxin to kill off the bacteria: there are many other drugs that originated from fungi
Bacteria grow very fast, produce proteins very fast, and have genomes that are easily messed with. It’s really pretty straightforward to insert genes into a bacterium’s own DNA, and the bacterium will then start churning out the product of whatever gene you put in.
which wouldn’t be possible to synthesize in a lab – it has to be made in a living system, and this is the best/cheapest way to make large quantities.
This is called recombinant technology, and is used to make a number of disease treatments like human insulin (formerly, we had to extract insulin from other large animals like cows or horses) or the “clot-busting drug” used to treat heart and stroke, r-tPA. tPA is actually an enzyme (tissue plasminogen activator, if you care
You can do similar things with yeast.
they produce enzymes…
then, people from biothecnology use these enzymes to make medicine, antibiotics, potion, poison, etc
some bacteria can kill diseases. like herpes can make tumors smaller but then they will just grow back after time. it kills the virus