Summer BanksCipro and working
September 4th 2006 22:28
cipro anthrax-bacteria
Because of all of the news about Anthrax recently, the drug Cipro is being discussed daily. Cipro, the Bayer brand name for the drug ciprofloxacin, is one of the antibiotics that is effective against the anthrax bacteria.
An enzyme is a protein that speeds up a particular chemical reaction. For example, one of the 1,000 enzymes in an E. coli's DNA might know how to break a maltose molecule (a simple sugar) into its two glucose molecules. That is all that that particular enzyme can do, but that action is important when an E. coli is eating maltose. Once the maltose is broken into glucose, other enzymes act on the glucose molecules to turn them into energy for the cell to use. Any cell has enzymes that help it digest food, add to the cell wall, duplicate DNA strands, produce energy molecules, and so on.
It inhibits bacterial nuclear DNA synthesis, so that bacteria rapidly die. The target is the enzyme DNA gyrase (topoisomerase II), which is responsible for the supercoiling and uncoiling of the DNA. Supercoiling of the DNA allows the long DNA molecule to fit into the cell. Uncoiling of the structure is the initiative step for replication, transcription and repair of the DNA. Thus, prolonged inhibition will eventually lead to the death of the cell.
In other words, inside E. Coli bacteria and anthrax bacteria is an enzyme, called topoisomerase II, that helps the cell to wind DNA into a compact structure and then unwind it when needed. Cipro blocks topoisomerase II and prevents it from doing its job. A bacterial cell that has Cipro in it can no longer uncoil its DNA in order to create enzymes or reproduce. The bacteria containing Cipro eventually die.
There are reports that Soviet scientists created antibiotic-resistant strains of anthrax. One easy way to accomplish this would be to grow large quantities of anthrax and then treat it with Cipro to see if any of the cells lived. Then you would allow those few living cells to reproduce. These would be Cipro-resistant cells. However, they would not be resistant to other antibiotics that happen to work against anthrax.
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