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US scientists have discovered a new family of antibiotics in soil samples.

The natural compounds could be used to combat hard-to-treat infections, the team at Rockefeller University hopes.

Tests show the compounds, called malacidins, annihilate several bacterial diseases that have become resistant to most existing antibiotics, including the superbug MRSA.

Experts say the work, published in Nature Microbiology, offers fresh hope in the antibiotics arms race.

Drug-resistant diseases are one of the biggest threats to global health.

They kill around 700,000 people a year, and new treatments are urgently needed.

Drugs from dirt

Soil is teeming with millions of different micro-organisms that produce lots of potentially therapeutic compounds, including new antibiotics.

Dr Sean Brady's team at New York's Rockefeller University has been busy unearthing them.

They used a gene sequencing technique to analyse more than 1,000 soil samples taken from across the US.

When they discovered malacidins in many of the samples, they had a hunch it was an important find.

They tested the compound on rats that they had given MRSA and it eliminated the infection in skin wounds.

The researchers are now working to improve the drug's effectiveness in the hope that it can be developed into a real treatment for people.

Dr Brady said: "It is impossible to say when, or even if, an early stage antibiotic discovery like the malacidins will proceed to the clinic.

"It is a long, arduous road from the initial discovery of an antibiotic to a clinically used entity."

Prof Colin Garner, from Antibiotic Research UK, said finding new antibiotics to treat gram-positive infections like MRSA was good news, but would not address the most pressing need.

"Our concern are the so called gram-negative bacteria which are difficult to treat and where resistance is on the increase," he said.

"Gram-negative bacteria cause pneumonia, blood and urinary tract infections as skin infections. We need new antibiotics to treat this class." </s> Malacidin appears to work differently than daptomycin, which was introduced in 2003 and has yet to be challenged by resistant bacteria. But scientists have reason to believe it will hold up at least as well. Even after 20 days of continued contact with malacidin — more than enough time for most bacteria to find a way to thwart an antibiotic’s effects — samples of MRSA bacteria showed no signs of evolving resistance to the newly discovered agent. </s> STOCKHOLM: The Nobel Chemistry Prize is to be announced on Wednesday, with observers suggesting it could go to gene-editing, the invention of the rechargeable battery or the discovery of new periodic elements.

Sweden’s biggest daily Dagens Nyheter tipped scientists at Russian, Japanese and US institutes that added four new elements to the periodic table: nihonium (Nh), moscovium (Mc), tennessine (Ts) and oganesson (Og).

John Goodenough—a 94-year-old US scientist who invented the rechargeable lithium ion battery that is present in cell phones, computers and electric cars—was another of the favorites for the honor, mentioned by Dagens Nyheter and Swedish radio SR.

Also seen as Nobel-worthy was a technique known as CRISPR that can edit parts of the genome of still-developing embryos by cutting out, replacing or adding parts to the DNA sequence.

It was named by influential US journal Science as 2015’s breakthrough of the year due to its potential to revolutionize health and medicine.

But it could be too early for the jury to award it a Nobel this year, Dagens Nyheter noted, as a bitter patent dispute is currently being waged over who discovered it first.

Sweden’s other main daily Svenska Dagbladet nonetheless also mentioned CRISPR as a possible winner.

It also pointed to Hong Kong doctor Yuk-Ming Dennis Lo, the director of the Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences.

Lo discovered a technique to detect chromosome abnormalities in unborn foetuses, such as Down’s Syndrome, where previous methods could cause a miscarriage.

The speculation will come to an end on Wednesday when the winner or winners are announced at 11:45 am (0945 GMT).

The chemistry prize is the third Nobel to be announced this week.

On Tuesday, the physics prize went to British scientists David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz for their work in on “topology”, a highly specialized mathematics field studying unusual phases or states of matter which may one day yield superfast and small computers.

On Monday, the medicine prize went to Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan for his pioneering work on autophagy—a process whereby cells “eat themselves”, which can result in Parkinson’s and diabetes when disrupted.

On Friday, all eyes will turn to Oslo where perhaps the most prestigious of the prizes, that for peace, will be announced.

The Norwegian jury has sifted through an avalanche of nominations this year—a record 376, almost a hundred more than the previous record from 2014.

Among those tipped are the orchestrators of two historic accords: the recent peace deal in Colombia between the government and the leftist FARC rebels, and the Iranian nuclear deal.

In a shock upset however, Colombians rejected the peace deal by a razor-thin majority in a referendum on Sunday, sending the former enemies’ chances of securing a Nobel up in smoke, according to experts.

Also mentioned are Russian activist Svetlana Gannushkina, who has championed the rights of migrants and refugees, Syria’s civil organization of emergency responders known as the White Helmets, and Greek islanders who have come to the aid of desperate migrants.

US fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden, who revealed the extent of the NSA’s surveillance programs, has meanwhile been nominated for the third straight year.

The economics prize will be announced on Monday, October 10, and the literature prize wraps things up on October 13.

For that prize, the Swedish Academy could tap superstar novelists such as Philip Roth of the US or Haruki Murakami of Japan, or some lesser known writers such as Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse or Syrian poet Adonis. AFP </s> STOCKHOLM — Three researchers who “harnessed the power of evolution” to produce enzymes and antibodies that have led to a new bestselling drug and biofuels won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday.

Frances Arnold of the California Institute of Technology was awarded half of the 9-million-kronor ($1.01 million) prize, while the other half will be shared by George Smith of the University of Missouri and Gregory Winter of the MRC molecular biology lab in Cambridge, England.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which chose the winners, said Arnold, 62, conducted the first directed evolution of enzymes, whose uses include “more environmentally friendly manufacturing of chemical substances such as pharmaceuticals and the production of renewable fuels.”

Smith, 77, developed a method to evolve new proteins and Winter used the method to evolve antibodies, which are disease-fighting proteins in the blood.

The first pharmaceutical based on Winter’s work was approved for use in 2002 and is employed to treat rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and inflammatory bowel diseases, the academy said. The chemical name of the drug is adalimumab, which has several trade named including Humira, one of the top-selling drugs in the world.

Smith, speaking to The Associated Press after learning about this Nobel win, credited others for the work that led to his breakthrough.

“Very few research breakthroughs are novel. Virtually all of them build on what went on before. It’s happenstance. That was certainly the case with my work,” he said Wednesday. “Mine was an idea in a line of research that built very naturally on the lines of research that went before.”

Smith said he learned of the prize in a pre-dawn phone call from Stockholm.

“It’s a standard joke that someone with a Swedish accent calls and says ‘You won!’ But there was so much static on the line, I knew it wasn’t any of my friends,” he said.

American Chemical Society president Peter Dorhout praised the Nobel winners, saying “the laureates have used chemistry to accelerate the evolution of natural biological molecules that act as the critical machinery for living organisms.

“The breakthroughs from these researchers enable that to occur thousands of times faster than nature to improve medicines, fuels and other products,” he said.

Experts said the developments for which the winners won the 2018 prize can be more ecological than many other chemical processes.

Enzymes “are what all we organisms use to make our chemicals. So if you can harness enzymes for your own purposes, this is often more environmentally friendly than using heavy metals or toxic substances to make your chemicals,” said Johan Aqvist, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

In other Nobel prizes this year, the medicine prize went Monday to James Allison of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University, who learned how to release the brakes that cancer can put on the immune system, discoveries that helped cancer doctors fight many advanced-stage tumors and save an “untold” numbers of lives.

Scientists from the United States, Canada and France shared the physics prize Tuesday for revolutionizing the use of lasers in research.

Arthur Ashkin became the oldest Nobel Prize laureate at 96, while Donna Strickland of the University of Waterloo in Canada became only the third woman to win a physics Nobel. Strickland had worked with the third winner, Frenchman Gerard Mourou of the Ecole Polytechnique and the University of Michigan.

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is to be announced Friday. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, honouring Alfred Nobel, the man who endowed the five Nobel Prizes, will be revealed on Monday.

No Nobel literature prize will be awarded this year due to a sex abuse scandal at the Swedish Academy, which choses the winner. The academy plans to announce both the 2018 and the 2019 winner next year — although the head of the Nobel Foundation has said the body must fix its tarnished reputation first.

The man at the centre of the Swedish Academy scandal, Jean-Claude Arnault, a major cultural figure in Sweden, was sentenced Monday to two years in prison for rape.

Heintz reported from Moscow. Malcolm Ritter and Chris Chester in New York contributed to this story. </s> STOCKHOLM — Three researchers who “harnessed the power of evolution” to produce enzymes and antibodies that have led to a new best-selling drug and biofuels won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday.

Frances Arnold of the California Institute of Technology was awarded half of the $1.01 million prize, while the other half will be shared by George Smith of the University of Missouri and Gregory Winter of the MRC molecular biology lab in Cambridge, England.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which chose the winners, said Arnold, 62, conducted the first directed evolution of enzymes, whose uses include “more environmentally friendly manufacturing of chemical substances such as pharmaceuticals and the production of renewable fuels.”

Smith, 77, developed a method to evolve new proteins and Winter used the method to evolve antibodies, which are disease-fighting proteins in the blood.

The first pharmaceutical based on Winter’s work was approved for use in 2002 and is employed to treat rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and inflammatory bowel diseases, the academy said. The chemical name of the drug is adalimumab, which has several trade named including Humira, one of the top-selling drugs in the world.

Smith, speaking to The Associated Press after learning about this Nobel win, credited others for the work that led to his breakthrough.

“Very few research breakthroughs are novel. Virtually all of them build on what went on before. It’s happenstance. That was certainly the case with my work,” he said Wednesday. “Mine was an idea in a line of research that built very naturally on the lines of research that went before.”

Smith said he learned of the prize in a pre-dawn phone call from Stockholm.

“It’s a standard joke that someone with a Swedish accent calls and says ‘You won!’ But there was so much static on the line, I knew it wasn’t any of my friends,” he said.

American Chemical Society president Peter Dorhout praised the Nobel winners, saying “the laureates have used chemistry to accelerate the evolution of natural biological molecules that act as the critical machinery for living organisms.

“The breakthroughs from these researchers enable that to occur thousands of times faster than nature to improve medicines, fuels and other products,” he said.

Experts said the developments for which the winners won the 2018 prize can be more ecological than many other chemical processes.

Enzymes “are what all we organisms use to make our chemicals. So if you can harness enzymes for your own purposes, this is often more environmentally friendly than using heavy metals or toxic substances to make your chemicals,” said Johan Aqvist, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

In other Nobel prizes this year, the medicine prize went Monday to James Allison of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University, who learned how to release the brakes that cancer can put on the immune system, discoveries that helped cancer doctors fight many advanced-stage tumors and save an “untold” numbers of lives.

Scientists from the United States, Canada and France shared the physics prize Tuesday for revolutionizing the use of lasers in research.

Arthur Ashkin became the oldest Nobel Prize laureate at 96, while Donna Strickland of the University of Waterloo in Canada became only the third woman to win a physics Nobel. Strickland had worked with the third winner, Frenchman Gerard Mourou of the Ecole Polytechnique and the University of Michigan.

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is to be announced Friday. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, honoring Alfred Nobel, the man who endowed the five Nobel Prizes, will be revealed on Monday.

No Nobel literature prize will be awarded this year due to a sex abuse scandal at the Swedish Academy, which choses the winner. The academy plans to announce both the 2018 and the 2019 winner next year — although the head of the Nobel Foundation has said the body must fix its tarnished reputation first.

The man at the center of the Swedish Academy scandal, Jean-Claude Arnault, a major cultural figure in Sweden, was sentenced Monday to two years in prison for rape.

Heintz reported from Moscow. Malcolm Ritter and Chris Chester in New York contributed to this story. </s> STOCKHOLM — Three researchers who "harnessed the power of evolution" to produce enzymes and antibodies that have led to a new best-selling drug and biofuels won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday.

Frances Arnold of the California Institute of Technology was awarded half of the 9-million-kronor ($1.01 million) prize, while the other half will be shared by George Smith of the University of Missouri and Gregory Winter of the MRC molecular biology lab in Cambridge, England.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which chose the winners, said Arnold, 62, conducted the first directed evolution of enzymes, whose uses include "more environmentally friendly manufacturing of chemical substances such as pharmaceuticals and the production of renewable fuels."

Smith, 77, developed a method to evolve new proteins and Winter used the method to evolve antibodies, which are disease-fighting proteins in the blood.

The first pharmaceutical based on Winter's work was approved for use in 2002 and is employed to treat rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and inflammatory bowel diseases, the academy said. The chemical name of the drug is adalimumab, which has several trade named including Humira, one of the top-selling drugs in the world.

Smith, speaking to The Associated Press after learning about this Nobel win, credited others for the work that led to his breakthrough.

"Very few research breakthroughs are novel. Virtually all of them build on what went on before. It's happenstance. That was certainly the case with my work," he said Wednesday. "Mine was an idea in a line of research that built very naturally on the lines of research that went before."

Smith said he learned of the prize in a pre-dawn phone call from Stockholm.

"It's a standard joke that someone with a Swedish accent calls and says 'You won!' But there was so much static on the line, I knew it wasn't any of my friends," he said.

American Chemical Society president Peter Dorhout praised the Nobel winners, saying "the laureates have used chemistry to accelerate the evolution of natural biological molecules that act as the critical machinery for living organisms.

"The breakthroughs from these researchers enable that to occur thousands of times faster than nature to improve medicines, fuels and other products," he said.

Experts said the developments for which the winners won the 2018 prize can be more ecological than many other chemical processes.

Enzymes "are what all we organisms use to make our chemicals. So if you can harness enzymes for your own purposes, this is often more environmentally friendly than using heavy metals or toxic substances to make your chemicals," said Johan Aqvist, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

In other Nobel prizes this year, the medicine prize went Monday to James Allison of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University, who learned how to release the brakes that cancer can put on the immune system, discoveries that helped cancer doctors fight many advanced-stage tumors and save an "untold" numbers of lives.

Scientists from the United States, Canada and France shared the physics prize Tuesday for revolutionizing the use of lasers in research.

Arthur Ashkin became the oldest Nobel Prize laureate at 96, while Donna Strickland of the University of Waterloo in Canada became only the third woman to win a physics Nobel. Strickland had worked with the third winner, Frenchman Gerard Mourou of the Ecole Polytechnique and the University of Michigan.

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is to be announced Friday. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, honoring Alfred Nobel, the man who endowed the five Nobel Prizes, will be revealed on Monday.

No Nobel literature prize will be awarded this year due to a sex abuse scandal at the Swedish Academy, which choses the winner. The academy plans to announce both the 2018 and the 2019 winner next year — although the head of the Nobel Foundation has said the body must fix its tarnished reputation first.

The man at the center of the Swedish Academy scandal, Jean-Claude Arnault, a major cultural figure in Sweden, was sentenced Monday to two years in prison for rape.

Want more stories about science?
• Sperm-inspired robots could be the next big thing in drug delivery
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• Scientists give Molly to octopuses, and yeah, it works </s> The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded on Monday to James P. Allison of the United States and Tasuku Honjo of Japan for their work on unleashing the body’s immune system to attack cancer, a breakthrough that has led to an entirely new class of drugs and brought lasting remissions to many patients who had run out of options.

Their success, which came after many researchers had given up on the idea, “brought immunotherapy out from decades of skepticism,” said Dr. Jedd Wolchok, a cancer specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. It has, he said, “led to human applications that have affected an untold number of people’s health.”

Before Dr. Allison’s and Dr. Honjo’s discoveries, cancer treatment consisted of surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and hormonal treatments. A statement from the Nobel committee hailed their accomplishments as establishing “an entirely new principle for cancer therapy.”

The drugs based on their work belong to a class called checkpoint inhibitors, with tongue-twisting names that have nonetheless become familiar to many patients. The first ones approved were ipilimumab (brand name Yervoy), nivolumab (Opdivo) and pembrolizumab (Keytruda). Others have since come to market. </s> In a new study, researchers detected high concentrations of these drugs and their metabolized remnants in the brain tissue of 10 fish species found in the Niagara River.

This vital conduit connects two of the Great Lakes, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, via Niagara Falls. The discovery of antidepressants in aquatic life in the river raises serious environmental concerns, says lead scientist Diana Aga, PhD, the Henry M. Woodburn Professor of Chemistry in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences.

"These active ingredients from antidepressants, which are coming out from wastewater treatment plants, are accumulating in fish brains," Aga says. "It is a threat to biodiversity, and we should be very concerned.

"These drugs could affect fish behavior. We didn't look at behavior in our study, but other research teams have shown that antidepressants can affect the feeding behavior of fish or their survival instincts. Some fish won't acknowledge the presence of predators as much."

If changes like these occur in the wild, they have the potential to disrupt the delicate balance between species that helps to keep the ecosystem stable, says study co-author Randolph Singh, PhD, a recent UB graduate from Aga's lab.

"The levels of antidepressants found do not pose a danger to humans who eat the fish, especially in the U.S., where most people do not eat organs like the brain," Singh says. "However, the risk that the drugs pose to biodiversity is real, and scientists are just beginning to understand what the consequences might be."

The research team included other scientists from UB, Ramkhamhaeng University and Khon Kaen University, both in Thailand, and SUNY Buffalo State. The study was published on Aug. 16 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

A dangerous cocktail of antidepressants in the water

Aga has spent her career developing techniques for detecting contaminants such as pharmaceuticals, antibiotics and endocrine disrupters in the environment.

This is a field of growing concern, especially as the use of such chemicals expands. The percentage of Americans taking antidepressants, for instance, rose 65 percent between 1999-2002 and 2011-14, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Wastewater treatment facilities have failed to keep pace with this growth, typically ignoring these drugs, which are then released into the environment, Aga says.

Her new study looked for a variety of pharmaceutical and personal care product chemicals in the organs and muscles of 10 fish species: smallmouth bass, largemouth bass, rudd, rock bass, white bass, white perch, walleye, bowfin, steelhead and yellow perch.

Antidepressants stood out as a major problem: These drugs or their metabolites were found in the brains of every fish species the scientists studied.

The highest concentration of a single compound was found in a rock bass, which had about 400 nanograms of norsertraline—a metabolite of sertraline, the active ingredient in Zoloft—per gram of brain tissue. This was in addition to a cocktail of other compounds found in the same fish, including citalopram, the active ingredient in Celexa, and norfluoxetine, a metabolite of the active ingredient in Prozac and Sarafem.

More than half of the fish brain samples had norsertraline levels of 100 nanograms per gram or higher. In addition, like the rock bass, many of the fish had a medley of antidepressant drugs and metabolites in their brains.

Evidence that antidepressants can change fish behavior generally comes from laboratory studies that expose the animals to higher concentrations of drugs than what is found in the Niagara River. But the findings of the new study are still worrisome: The antidepressants that Aga's team detected in fish brains had accumulated over time, often reaching concentrations that were several times higher than the levels in the river.

In the brains of smallmouth bass, largemouth bass, rock bass, white bass and walleye, sertraline was found at levels that were estimated to be 20 or more times higher than levels in river water. Levels of norsertraline, the drug's breakdown product, were even greater, reaching concentrations that were often hundreds of times higher than that found in the river.

Scientists have not done enough research yet to understand what amount of antidepressants poses a risk to animals, or how multiple drugs might interact synergistically to influence behavior, Aga says.

Wastewater treatment is behind the times

The study raises concerns regarding wastewater treatment plants, whose operations have not kept up with the times, says Aga, a member of the UB RENEW (Research and Education in eNergy, Environment and Water) Institute.

In general, wastewater treatment focuses narrowly on killing disease-causing bacteria and on extracting solid matter such as human excrement. Antidepressants, which are found in the urine of people who use the drugs, are largely ignored, along with other chemicals of concern that have become commonplace, Aga says.

"These plants are focused on removing nitrogen, phosphorus, and dissolved organic carbon but there are so many other chemicals that are not prioritized that impact our environment," she says. "As a result, wildlife is exposed to all of these chemicals. Fish are receiving this cocktail of drugs 24 hours a day, and we are now finding these drugs in their brains."

The problem is exacerbated, Singh says, by sewage overflows that funnel large quantities of untreated water into rivers and lakes. In August, for example, The Buffalo News reported that since May of 2017, a half billion gallons of combined sewage and storm water had flowed into local waterways, including the Niagara River.

More information: Prapha Arnnok et al. Selective Uptake and Bioaccumulation of Antidepressants in Fish from Effluent-Impacted Niagara River, Environmental Science & Technology (2017). DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.7b02912 </s> The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2018 was jointly awarded Wednesday to three people who've used the power of evolution "to develop proteins that solve mankind's chemical problems."

Frances H. Arnold, from California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, will get half of the $1.01 million prize for "the directed evolution of enzymes"

The other half will jointly go to George P. Smith, of the University of Missouri, and Gregory P. Winter, from Cambridge University, for their work in evolving new proteins.

All three "have taken control of evolution," using the principles of genetic change and selection to create proteins, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences wrote in its announcement.

Arnold made the first enzymes -- proteins that catalyse chemical reactions -- through directed evolution, and they've been used in the production ranging from biofuels to pharmaceuticals.

She's the fifth woman to receive the chemistry prize, and follows Ada E Yonath in 2009, according to The Guardian.

Arnold is only the fifth woman to be awarded the prize for chemistry -- the last female scientist to scoop the award was Ada E Yonath in 2009, who shared the prize for her work on understanding the structure of ribosomes, the protein-manufacturing structures inside cells.

Smith developed phage display, where a bacteriophage (a virus that infects bacteria) is used to evolve new proteins. Winter used the process to make new pharmaceuticals, and it's made "antibodies that can neutralise toxins, counteract autoimmune diseases and cure metastatic cancer."

The first drug based on this work is used to fight rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and inflammatory bowel disease, the Associated Press reported, citing the academy.

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics went to laser physics inventors Arthur Ashkin, Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland on Tuesday, while the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo on Monday, for their breakthrough in cancer research.

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday. This year's Nobel Prize in Literature has been postponed.
Scientists announce the discovery of malacidins, a new class of antibacterial chemicals.