Extreme medicine: The search for new antibiotics<p><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/extreme-medicine-search-antibiotics-080927742--finance.html"><img src="http://l2.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/5cBW2dvbfi9OjHbahmwlXg--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Zmk9ZmlsbDtoPTg2O3E9NzU7dz0xMzA-/http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/Reuters/2014-08-17T081625Z_1_LYNXMPEA7G03H_RTROPTP_2_HEALTH-ANTIBIOTICS-SEARCH.JPG" width="130" height="86" alt="A handout photograph shows Streptomyces coelicolor" align="left" title="A handout photograph shows Streptomyces coelicolor" border="0" /></a>Africa provides a glimpse of what the world looks like when the drugs we rely on to fight disease and prevent infections after operations stop working. Â Â Â In South Africa, patients with tuberculosis that has developed resistance to all known antibiotics are already simply sent home to die, while West Africa's Ebola outbreak shows what can happen when there are no medicines to fight a deadly infection - in this case due to a virus rather than bacteria. Yet for academic microbiologists these are exciting times in antibiotic research - thanks to a push into extreme environments and advances in genomics. Â Â Â "It's a good time to be researching antibiotics because there are a lot of new avenues to explore," said Christophe Corre, a Royal Society research fellow in the department of chemistry at the University of Warwick. EXTREME LOCATIONS, SMART TECHNIQUES Marcel Jaspars, a professor of organic chemistry at Britain's University of Aberdeen, is leading a dive deep into the unknown to search for bacteria that have, quite literally, never before seen the light of day.</p><br clear="all"/>
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