A 2004 research article estimated that more than $8 billion worth of penicillin and its derivatives are sold yearly. At this scale, the batches are so large that small tweaks to the system can produce large cost savings, Bennett says. Current methods of increasing antibiotic production by selecting high-yielding strains are laborious, and sexual reproduction offers an alternative.
In addition, simply inducing sex in P. chrysogenum could boost penicillin production, Kück says. The sexually reproducing P. chrysogenum grow in pellets rather than filaments. This morphological change would give the fungi easier access to nutrients and oxygen when they are in the large industrial fermenter vats used to grow cultures. A pelleted culture also requires less energy to mix than do sticky filaments.
Besides making penicillin manufacturing more efficient, the discovery could lead to new antibiotics altogether. "You could speculate that maybe among all the different crosses there could conceivably be production of novel metabolites that have antibiotic activity," Dyer says. Developments like that would require just the right conditions.
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Add CommentSomething has always puzzled me about medicines like Penicillin which are taken orally. How it is that medicine that has to go through what is essentially an “acid bath” in our stomachs is still intact in the lower gut? I am assuming that this must be the case since they are most likely absorbed through the intestinal walls o reach the blood stream.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf there was a better way of producing penicillin nature would have done it in the billions of years it had at it's disposal. What man produces in the industrial factory by genetic tweaking will be of inferior quality and stability. It's effects also would not last long warranting recurring application of penicillin adding to the cost of treatment for the patient and the profit of the researchers and to the pharmaceuticals . Of course , ultimately the pharma win through high powered advertisements and media barrage and, the people pay for all that .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMany medicines rely on the acid in the stomach to become soluble. The pH in the stomach is so low that the molecules are able to be ionised and hence become soluble in an aqueous medium and would be able to enter the blood stream.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn the other hand, some tablets have a special coating to limit their dissolution in the stomach (in an acidic environment) but would dissolve in the intestine (where the pH is not acidic, such as pH6.8). In other word they remain as an intact tablet in the stomach but would start to dissolve in the intestines. Such tablets are referred to as delayed release tablets. According to wikipedia:""Delayed release" is also commonly used in a different sense in the pharmacological industry, to refer to oral medicines that do not immediately disintegrate and release the active ingredient(s) into the body. An example is enteric coated oral medications, which dissolve in the intestines rather than the stomach".
Hope this helps ;)
Thank you for taking the time to supply me with some info. I was aware of the tablet type such as those with enteric coating, but I was specifically thinking of the liquid medicines containing penicillin that my children took when they were younger. Your description of this type medicine being activated, so to speak, by the acid in the stomach in preparation for its absorption in the Intestine makes perfect sense.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe idea that evolution is a process directed toward improving something to help a different species (that needs penicillin to cure its diseases, for example) is really a serious misunderstanding of how evolution works. If making more penicillin was of any benefit to the mold itself, those strains that made more penicillin would gradually our-reproduce those that made less, not because they were "trying" to improve their lot by making more penicillin, just as giraffes did not gradually grow longer necks from trying to reach higher leaves to eat from tall trees. So cross-breeding penicillin-producing molds to produce a greater yield of penicillin would not have occurred in nature, because penicillin molds that produce more penicillin have no evolutionary advantage over the "regular" ones. It is the same as antibiotic-resistant bacteria only thriving in the presence of antibiotics, because it is only the presence of antibiotics that allows them to out-reproduce their Petri-dish mates, and gradually replace them, not because they strove to become antibiotic-resistant so their children could have a more secure life.
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