Tiny DNA pyramids enter bacteria easily — and deliver a deadly payload
[Via Eureka! Science News – Popular science news]
Bacterial infections usually announce themselves with pain and fever but often can be defeated with antibiotics — and then there are those that are sneaky and hard to beat. Now, scientists have built a new weapon against such pathogens in the form of tiny DNA pyramids. Published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, their study found the nanopyramids can flag bacteria and kill more of them than medicine alone.
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Medicine using nanoparticles to carry a drug holds a lot of promise. But the structural carriers for the drugs can cause health problems.
So, why not use a natural product to construct the carriers? Here they uses small stretches of DNA to create a pyramid which could then carry the necessary machinery/drugs.
While they have not used this in a human being, these researchers did say that using this DNA pyramid to carry an antibiotic substantially enhanced the killing ability of the drug.
A Man With A Ph.D. 