Anthrax treatment discovered

Recent studies conducted on the African Violet have given scientists new insights into treating anthrax.

The research, carried out by the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick and published in Nature Chemical Biology, identifies a weakness in the way the bacterial pathogen Pectobacterium chrysanthemi attacks the violet.

The pathogen attacks the plant by competing with it for iron, which the pathogen cannot survive without.

The study examined how the bacterium actually harvests this iron, by concentrating on how it uses one of the key tools in this process, a “siderophore,” which is a molecule that binds and transports iron in microorganisms.

They found an enzyme in the siderophore that binds citric acid, which is an iron-binding component.

The significance of this is that the enzyme could be suppressed to stop the bacterium from harvesting iron, and without this element it could not survive.

Although this is more related to helping African Violets survive, the team from Warwick found that other deadly infections, such as anthrax, use a similar enzyme to incorporate citric acid into another siderophore.

This discovery means that there is a potential to use similar methods to suppress enzymes in both the Anthrax and the African Violet pathogens.

One of the researchers in the team from Warwick, Professor Gregory L. Challis, said, “inhibiting this citric acid-based process could be even more effective in combating an anthrax infection than it would be in combating the African Violet pathogen, because the African Violet pathogen has a second siderophore that can harvest iron from the host and could attempt to struggle on with just this, whereas the anthrax pathogen appears not to have such a back up mechanism.”

Scientists are hoping that the discovery will stop potentially fatal anthrax infections.

Moreover, researchers are also looking at similar enzymes in other infections such as E. coli and MRSA, in the hope that drugs could be developed to fight these infections more effectively.