German researchers analyzed the effect of 144 antibiotics in the most common microbes in the human intestine. The article of scientists was published in the journal Nature.
The consumption of antibiotics causes serious damage to the intestinal microbiota – the microbial community and viruses, helping to digest food and fight pathogenic bacteria. Antibiotic therapy can disrupt the balance in microbiota and lead to dysbioma, the long-term consequence of which asthma, food allergies and obesity can become. However, the study of the harm of antibiotics for intestinal microbes has not yet been systematic.
Scientists from the European Molecular Biological Laboratory estimated how 144 different antibiotics affect the growth and survival of 27 bacterial strains living in the intestine. The researchers identified concentrations in which one or another antibiotic will affect one or another microbe for more than 800 combinations of “antibiotic strains”. Scientists found out that tetracyclines and macrolides are the two most common groups of antibiotics – not only stopped the growth of bacteria, but also caused their death. Their effects did not survive more than half of bacterial strains.
“We studied whether the second drug would be able to level the harmful effects of antibiotics for intestinal microbes, allowing the first at the same time to maintain their activity against pathogens,” said the head of the scientific group Anastasios Tyats. The researchers studied the combination of erythromycin and doxycycline – one of the most widely used antibiotics – with more than 1200 drugs. Scientists managed to detect several drugs with the necessary properties.
In the course of experiments, the researchers showed that this approach can work in practice – a combination of erythromycin with antidote drug reduced the loss of common intestinal bacteria in mice. At the same time, scientists recognize, they still have a lot of work to identify optimal combinations and dosages of such combinations, as well as to identify long-term effects on their application.