Scientists have used gene-editing advances to achieve a tenfold increase in the production of super-bug targeting formicamycin antibiotics.

The John Innes Centre researchers used the technology to create a new strain of Streptomyces formicae bacteria which over-produces the medically promising molecules.

Discovered within the last ten years, formicamycins have great potential because, under laboratory conditions, superbugs like MRSA do not become resistant to them.

However, Streptomyces formicae only produce the antibiotics in small quantities. This has made it difficult to scale up purification for further study and is an obstacle to the molecules being taken forward for clinical trials.

In a new study, researchers used CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing to make a strain which produces ten times more formicamycins on agar plates and even more in liquid cultures.

Using DNA sequencing they found the formicamycin biosynthetic gene cluster consists of 24 genes and is controlled by the activity of three key regulators inside the cluster.

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