Giving Compass' Take:

• Yu-Hsuan Tsai shares how her research aims to alter bacteria to prevent them from infecting hosts, work that becomes more important as antibiotic resistance grows. 

• How can funders help to accelerate work to prevent the devastating effects of antibiotic resistance? 

• Learn how to find and fund scientific research. 

Changing someone’s genetic programming is easier than you might think. While techniques for altering DNA at the molecular level are becoming more widely used, it’s also possible to simply turn genes on or off without permanently changing the underlying genetic material. That means we can affect the genetic instructions that get sent to an organism’s body by changing its environment or with drugs.

In our study, we found that adding an acetyl tag to HU significantly affected the way it interacted with the DNA. This means it’s highly likely that such modification makes epigenetic changes, affecting how the bacteria grow and infect other organisms. So if we can create drugs that make these changes to bacterial proteins in this way, we could have a new way of stopping infections.

This is a really important challenge in medicine right now, because bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics kill 700,000 people a year worldwide. If we don’t find new treatments, the annual death toll could rise to 10 million by 2025.

Once we verify the link between specific epigenetic changes and bacterial infection, we can begin looking for substances that alter bacteria’s epigenetics in this way to make it less harmful. There are already several molecules targeting human epigenetics in a similar way under preclinical development or in clinical trials. So a drug that “turns off” bacteria’s ability to cause infections may not be too far away.

Read the full article about altering bacteria by Yu-Hsuan Tsai at Smithsonian Magazine.