A D V A N C E D M A T E R I A L S & P R O C E S S E S | N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 2 7 mutations that cause specific diseases, this database and the accompanying structure-function analyses gives biologists and materials scientists the ability to derive direct genetic causes for the properties of spider silk,” Blamires says. www.unsw.edu.au. METALS THAT FIGHT FUNGAL INFECTIONS In an effort to encourage the development of antifungal and antibacterial agents, researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia have founded the Community for Open Antimicrobial Drug Discovery, or CO-ADD. The ambitious goal of the initiative is to find new antimicrobial active agents by offering chemists worldwide the opportunity to test any chemical compound against bacteria and fungi at no cost. As lead researcher Angelo Frei explains, the initial focus of CO-ADD has been on organic molecules. However, he’s trying to develop new metal-based antibiotics with his research group at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and has found that over 1000 of the more than 300,000 compounds tested by CO-ADD contained metals. The researchers tested 21 highly active metal compounds against various resistant fungal strains. These included cobalt, nickel, rhodium, palladium, silver, europium, iridium, platinum, molybdenum, and gold. Themost active compounds were then tested in a model organism—the larvae of a wax moth. Researchers observed that just one of the eleven tested metal compounds showed signs of toxicity, while the others were well tolerated by the larvae. In the next step, some metal compounds were tested in an infection model, and one compound was effective in reducing the fungal infection in larvae. “Our This Petri dish shows a fungal strand shaped as the symbol for platinum (Pt) growing on red agar. Courtesy of CO-ADD. hope is that our work will improve the reputation of metals in medical applications and motivate other research groups to further explore this large but relatively unexplored field,” says Frei. www.unibe.ch/eng.
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