Galway Bay fm newsroom – Research led by scientists at NUI Galway has identified a new way to make the MRSA superbug more susceptible to antibiotics.
The MRSA superbug is resistant to penicillin-type antibiotics making infections in patients difficult to treat.
The research team has discovered a new way to mutate a gene called sucC in MRSA which can change numerous proteins in the superbug and make it more sensitive to antibiotics.
The research was carried out by a team from the Discipline of Microbiology at NUIG in collaboration with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Nebraska Medical Centre in the US, and the University of Umeå in Sweden.
The study has been published in the flagship journal of the American Society for Microbiology, mBio, and was funded by the Health Research Board and the Irish Research Council.
Senior author of the study and Professor of Infectious Disease Microbiology at NUI Galway, Jim O’Gara says their research has discovered a weakness in the superbug which they hope to exploit.
