Question: how do you defeat a killer microbe?

Ian Wilson answered on 20 Jun 2013:

Hi Cerys,

The first thing scientists need to do when trying to kill a microbe is to work out how it’s hurting and killing us. If you imagine a microbe in our bodies as a tiny spaceship, it might have shields, be able to fire off loads of missiles, be able to dock with our cells and drill into them… They can be pretty nasty.

So what we do first is work out which of these weapons and defences the microbe has. If we can work out what it can do, we can find out what we should be targeting. So we may choose to break its shields or stop its missiles firing. That’s what antibiotics do. They target particular proteins on a microbe and stop them working or being made.

My project involves finding some of the weapons and defences that are most important to the microbe I work on – Entamoeba histolytica. I’m doing this by comparing its genes with those of its harmless cousins. In theory, they won’t have all of the weapons that E. histolytica has because they don’t harm us so don’t need weapons. If I can find out which genes only E. histolytica has, there’s a good chance that some of them might be weapons or defences important in attacking us. Other researchers will then be able to start finding out which molecules we can use in antibiotics to stop the weapons working.

Does that make sense?

Ian