Diagnosing tuberculosis (TB) early can allow patients to receive the medicine they need and also help prevent the disease from spreading. But in resource-limited areas, equipment requirements and long wait times for results are obstacles to diagnosis and treatment. To tackle this problem, scientists report in ACS Sensors the development of a fast, paper-based tuberculosis test that can be read with a smartphone.

The number of drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) cases is rising globally. But a newly discovered natural antibiotic — produced by bacteria from the lung infection in a cystic fibrosis patient — could help fight these infections. Lab testing reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society shows that the compound is active against multi-drug resistant strains.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a highly infectious disease and a major global health problem, especially in countries with developing health care systems. Because there is no fast, easy way to detect TB, the deadly infection can spread quickly through communities. Now, a team reports in ACS Sensors the development of a rapid, sensitive and low-cost method for detecting the disease in resource-limited areas.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved the first new drug to fight tuberculosis (TB) in more than 40 years, but treatment still takes six months, 200 pills and leaves 40 percent of patients uncured. Thus, new targets are needed. Today in ACS Central Science, researchers report they have identified one such target -- a gene that allows the disease to camp out in human immune cells, and is thus essential for the organism's proliferation.

The discovery of antibiotics produced by soil fungi and bacteria gave the world life-saving medicine. But new antimicrobials from this resource have become scarce as the threat of drug resistance grows. Now, scientists have started mining lakes and rivers for potential pathogen-fighters, and they’ve found one from Lake Michigan that is effective against drug-resistant tuberculosis. Their report on the new compound appears in the journal ACS Infectious Diseases.

DALLAS, March 17, 2014 — In response to drug-resistant “superbugs” that send millions of people to hospitals around the world, scientists are building tiny, “molecular drill bits” that kill bacteria by bursting through their protective cell walls. They presented some of the latest developments on these drill bits, better known to scientists as antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), at the 247^th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world’s largest scientific society.