Re: [DIYbio] diy MRSA antibiotic using garlic, reproduced in lab

I see what you're saying yet if it's so obvious or unsurprising then presumably it should have been published within the past couple decades already (or has it? Not that I remember.).  MRSA is important.   Raise your hand if you've been prescribed the typical metabolic-nuclear-assault antibiotics that you didn't want or possibly did not need. 

Oh right, a simple garlic combo mix wouldn't be investigated because:  "Let's not work on that, it's not novel enough", or, "There's no patent opportunities here, there's no new I.P.",  or, "That type of work is a dead end."   The same "lack of characterization" problem of biotech.   Not sure where the supposed billions of R&D dollars searching for new antibiotics is going, eh?   The video article mentions the key phrases from lab members:  "We didn't expect anything" ...  "This was a side project for the lab".  Of course this article could be headline fluff or university P. R. hype, won't know until refs are scrutinized so it's best not to take any of it too seriously until then.


(Though anyway, I'm a dude who chops my garlic and leaves it sitting on the counter for several minutes before cooking with it to increase magic and even then I add it at the end so as to not expose it to significant cooking heat, under auspices that it's reducing my statistical risk for typical bad things, so whatta I know.  -- Ref,  I think, maybe in here: Analytical Sciences Vol. 25 (2009) , No. 1 p.137, by Yanbei ZHU, Kazumi INAGAKI, Hiroki HARAGUCHI and Koichi CHIBA.)


A related factoid here is that I didn't know otherwise healthy people would want to regularly take bovine bile acid supplements.    Eww.  


## Jonathan Cline
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On Tuesday, March 31, 2015 at 5:04:58 PM UTC-7, alexander hollins wrote:

Yeah.. I'm not sure what the surprise is.  It reminds me of George Carlin bit about "happens to be black".   Allicin is one of the first sulfa antibiotics we used, and is a direct extract from Garlic.  With the salts and such that are in there, you're basically breaking down the fats and protiens and extracting it, and Sulfa drugs have already been shown to be amazingly effective on Mersa (and yet no one prescribes it... sigh)

The wonder of the whole thing is how detailed the process is for the time frame, not that it works.  

On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 4:46 PM, Jonathan Cline <jcl...@ieee.org> wrote:

Today's big pharma ain't got nuthin on 9th century Anglo-Saxon diybio?

 

""A one thousand year old Anglo-Saxon remedy for eye infections which originates from a manuscript in the British Library has been found to kill the modern-day superbug MRSA in an unusual research collaboration at The University of Nottingham.""

Bald's eye salve [as listed in BBC news article, see ref below]:

Equal amounts of garlic and another allium (onion or leek), finely chopped and crushed in a mortar for two minutes.

Add 25ml (0.87 fl oz) of English wine - taken from a historic vineyard near Glastonbury.

Dissolve bovine salts in distilled water, add and then keep chilled for nine days at 4C.

...
"" Early results on the 'potion', tested in vitro at Nottingham and backed up by mouse model tests at a university in the United States, are, in the words of the US collaborator, "astonishing". The solution has had remarkable effects on Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) which is one of the most antibiotic-resistant bugs costing modern health services billions. ""