Author: Aimee Cunningham / Source: Science News
Certain skin-dwelling microbes may be anticancer superheroes, reigning in uncontrolled cell growth.
This surprise discovery could one day lead to drugs that treat or maybe even prevent skin cancer.The bacteria’s secret weapon is a chemical compound that stops DNA formation in its tracks. Mice slathered with one strain of Staphylococcus epidermidis that makes the compound developed fewer tumors after exposure to damaging ultraviolet radiation compared with those treated with a strain lacking the compound, researchers report online February 28 in Science Advances.
The findings highlight “the potential of the microbiome to influence human disease,” says Lindsay Kalan, a biochemist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Staphylococcal species are the most numerous of the many bacteria that normally live on human skin. Richard Gallo and his colleagues were investigating the antimicrobial powers of these bacteria when the team discovered a strain of S. epidermidis that made a compound — 6-N-hydroxyaminopurine, or 6-HAP for short — that looked a lot like one of the building blocks of DNA. “Because of that structure, we wondered if it interfered with DNA synthesis,” says Gallo, a physician scientist at the University of California, San Diego. In a test tube experiment, 6-HAP blocked the enzyme that builds DNA chains and prevented the chains from growing.
Mice treated with a strain of S. epidermidis that does not make the compound 6-HAP and then exposed to ultraviolet rays developed UV-induced tumors (left). The skin of…
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