From a spoonful of Iranian soil, two brand-new compounds: lavasamycin A and B

Soil is the original pharmacy — most of our antibiotics were first found in microbes that live in it — and the catalogue is not finished. Scientists at Germany's Leibniz Institute DSMZ and the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research have characterised a new subspecies of a soil bacterium, Streptomyces barkulensis subspecies lavasanensis, from a sample collected in Lavasan, Iran. The microbe produces two previously unknown natural products, lavasamycin A and B, members of the anthraquinone family that chemists prize for biological activity. In laboratory tests, lavasamycin A inhibited the growth of the common bacterium Bacillus subtilis, and the team — whose work appears in the Journal of Natural Products — found that switching off a single repressor gene makes the microbe produce far more of the compounds. New chemistry, from a spoonful of soil, now available for the world's researchers to explore.

SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: tech innovation