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The Discovery of Penicillin. In 1928, thanks to a lucky accident, Fleming made the most important discovery of his life. He was using Staphylococcus bacteria when he noticed that the bacteria could not survive if a mold, called Penicillium notatum, contaminated the sample.
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CONTRIBUTIONS TO SCIENCE. Revelations Regarding Antiseptics. Discovery of Lysozyme. Discovery of Penicillin. The Legacy of Penicillin. Sir Alexander Fleming was a Scottish physician and microbiologist best known for his discovery of penicillin, the world's first and widely effective antibiotic.
- Tiny Foes and Friends
- An Accident Waiting to Happen…
- How Does Penicillin Work?
- The Resistance Is Rising…
- Conclusion
- Conflict of Interest
Bacteria are very important for us. They live on us and inside us, and we use them to obtain certain nutrients from food, among many other things (Read more in this Young Minds article; We Are Never Alone: Living with the Human Microbiota ). But some bacteria, called pathogens, can also cause infections and some pathogens can be very dangerous. Pat...
On the morning of Monday, September 3, 1928, Fleming was coming back from a family holiday . Before he went on holiday, Fleming was working with a very common pathogen: Staphylococcus aureus. Fleming left some glass Petri dishes on his lab bench, with these bacteria growing on the surface of solid medium. Usually, these plates would be sterilized b...
The way that penicillin works to inhibit bacterial growth was not understood until 1980. Now we know that penicillin inhibits the activity of certain enzymes in bacteria called penicillin-binding proteins (PBPs), which are essential for most bacteria to create a wall that covers their cells. Without that wall, bacterial cells are much more exposed ...
What Fleming also predicted during his speech accepting the Nobel Prize in 1945 was that bacteria may become resistant to antibiotics. This is just happening due to evolution, because bacteria can adapt very quickly to overcome any hurdle limiting their growth. The changes that help bacteria to adapt may be driven by random mutations in their DNA, ...
The discovery of penicillin was only possible in a laboratory where contaminations were common. Chance certainly played a role in the discovery of the first antibiotic, but the training and laboratory practice of Fleming were essential for him to identify one of the most important drugs in human history. Unfortunately, due to antibiotic resistance,...
The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Fleming’s legendary discovery of penicillin occurred in 1928, while he was investigating staphylococcus, a common type of bacteria that causes boils and can also cause disastrous infections in patients with weakened immune systems.
