New drug cripples deadly bacteria.

• Position: Pneumococci - Infectious Diseases

Approximately 1,600,000 people die worldwide every year as a result of pneumococcal infection, which causes grave illnesses, including pneumonia, meningitis, and middle-ear infections. Children and the elderly especially are at risk. Vaccines are effective against only a few of the pneumococcal types and increasing resistance to antibiotics is making treatment more difficult.

Researchers led by Jesus M. Sanz at the Miguel Hernandez University (Elche, Spain) and Maarten Merkx at the Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands) have introduced a highly promising new approach for the development of drugs to treat pneumococci. The scientists copied the choline 7 wall. They were able to trap the choline-binding proteins that have a critical effect on the infectiousness of pneumococcal bacteria.

The cell wails of pneumococci contain special polymers, called teichoic acids, that are equipped with phosphocholine groups and induce a characteristic choline architecture on the cell walls. The choline group acts as docking stations for a number of special proteins that are involved in important processes such as cell-wall division, the release of bacterial toxins, and adhesion to infected tissues. These choline-binding proteins (CBP) contain domains with multiple neighboring choline-binding sites. The protein LytA, for instance, has a domain with four choline-binding sites.

If choline is added to a culture of pneumococci, the molecules occupy the choline binding sites of...