(no title)
_--__--__ | 1 month ago
>BCS3-L1 has four main genetic modifications:
It produces a weak antibiotic, mutacin-1140, which kills competing oral bacteria.
It’s immune to mutacin-1140, so it doesn’t kill itself.
It metabolizes sugar through a different chemical pathway that ends in alcohol instead of lactic acid.
It lacks a peptide that its species usually uses to arrange gene transfers with other bacteria.
stephenitis|1 month ago
I looked up mutacin—1140, found this 2018 study looking at the effect on staph and possibly positive persistence in the gut.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6256755/
> “Nisin and mutacin 1140 have potent activities (nanomolar or submicromolar activity) against well-known Gram-positive pathogens, including Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pneumoniae. Nisin has been used as a food preservative for more than 50 years without inducing significant resistance”
> “ Despite the short half-life of mutacin 1140 in blood, analogs of mutacin 1140 were demonstrated to have increased gastric stability and were effective in treating a Clostridium difficile infection in hamsters “
this very interesting to me.
we fought off a extreme overgrowth of staph aureus with a regiment of probiotics and bacillus subtillis (a bacterium found in dirt that is known to disrupt quorum of bacteria that create biofilms.
biofilms are a huge reason to floss and brush our teeth, it’s like a slime that protects and nourishes the bad bacteria on our teeth.
this bit from the sparse wikipedia was interesting. “Mutacin 1140 belongs to the epidermin subset of type Al lantibiotics.”
are there other bacterium in our oral/gut that produce these kind of compounds?
stephenitis|1 month ago
Wouldn’t it be better to have a probiotic toothpaste?