Rockefeller University -- With their best chemical antibiotics slowly failing, scientists are increasingly looking to nature for a way to control deadly staph bacteria — the culprit behind most hospital infections. Naturally toxic for bacteria, enzymes called lysins have the promising ability to obliterate staph, but the problem is producing large enough quantities of them to study how they work. Rockefeller University scientists have now overcome this barrier by engineering a lysin that not only kills multidrug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in mice, but also works synergistically with traditional antibiotics that have long been shelved due to resistance.
