Moisissures

Over the last 4 decades, the rate of discovery of novel antibiotics has decreased drastically, ending the era of fortuitous antibiotic discovery. A better understanding of the biology of bacteriogenic toxins potentially helps to prospect for new antibiotics. To initiate this line of research, we quantified antagonists from two different sites at two different depths of soil and found the relative number of antagonists to correlate with the bacterial load and carbon-to-nitrogen (C/N) ratio of the soil. Consecutive studies show the importance of antagonist interactions between soil isolates and the lack of a predicted role for nutrient availability and, therefore, support an in situ role in offense for the production of toxins in environments of high bacterial loads...

Ernest Duchesne (1874-1912) completed his thesis on microbial antagonism in 1897 in Lyon. His work lay unknown for fifty years, but on being brought to light led to his being credited with having discovered penicillin prior to Alexander Fleming. The claims surrounding Duchesne are examined here both from the strictly microbiological perspective, and also for what they reveal about how the process of discovery is frequently misconstrued. The combined weight of evidence presented here militates strongly against the possibility that the species of Penicillium that Duchesne worked with produced penicillin...