Two research teams from the University of Bern and the ETH Zurich have developed a new method to shed light onto a mostly unknown process of bacterial protein production. Their results could be used for the design of new antibiotics.

Ribosomes are the factories of the cell and, as such, are responsible for the fabrication of proteins. They resemble a complex and highly dynamic machinery made of ribosomal RNA molecules and a variety of ribosomal proteins. As long as theses factories run smoothly, amino acids are put together incessantly deep in the center of the complex to form new proteins that are then released through a special narrow ribosomal exit tunnel. But sometimes things get stuck in the fabrication line. Proteins are hindered to leave the exit tunnel and the whole machinery is stalled.

Widespread stalling is fatal for the cell, and that is why it is efficiently targeted by antibiotics. Indeed, ribosomes are so central for the functioning of the cell that any serious obstruction of the machinery has serious consequences for the whole organism. That is why more than half of the naturally occurring antibiotics target the ribosome in some way. Understanding the mechanisms of where and how these antibiotics obstruct the protein factory is therefore a promising path towards new antibiotics, a research field that is becoming more and more important as the known antibiotics gradually lose their potency. "We need a targeted use of new antibiotics in order to fight antibiotics resistances", says Norbert Polacek of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Bern and group leader of in the National Centre of Competence in Research "RNA & Disease". Together with the group of Jonathan Hall of the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences at the ETH Zurich, he has now discovered a possible way to new antibiotics.

The findings of the study were published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research.