AI is taking on antibiotic resistance — here’s how

Some bacteria are becoming resistant to the antibiotics commonly used to control them. Credit: NIAID/NIH/Science Photo Library When it comes to bacterial infections in the gut, antibiotics are effective yet broad-acting: although they might kill disease-causing species effectively, beneficial microflora can get caught in the crossfire. This indiscriminate effect can be harmful, particularly for people with Crohn’s disease or other chronic gastrointestinal conditions. It also increases the likelihood that antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria will evolve. In 2023, microbiologist Jonathan Stokes at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, began looking for options that could target pathogens with greater precision. He and his colleagues screened some 10,000 bioactive compounds for antibacterial activity against a strain of Escherichia coli that can cause severe gut infections. They filtered the results on the basis of various criteria, including toxicity to bacteria and structural novelty compared with existing antibiotics. “We got super lucky in that we only ended up with one molecule,” says Denise Catacutan, the doctoral student in Stokes’s laboratory who led the work 1 . But the team needed to confirm that the promising molecule, named enterololin, was specific to its target pathogen, rather than acting as another broad-spectrum antibiotic. …