MIT News  May 25, 2023 Discovering new antibiotics against Acinetobacter baumannii, a pathogen that often displays multidrug resistance has proven challenging through conventional screening approaches. An international team of researchers (Canada, USA – MIT, Harvard University) screened ~7,500 molecules for those that inhibited the growth of A. baumannii in vitro and trained a neural network with this growth inhibition dataset and performed in silico predictions for structurally new molecules with activity against A. baumannii. They discovered abaucin, an antibacterial compound with narrow-spectrum activity against A. baumannii. Further investigations revealed that abaucin perturbs lipoprotein trafficking, and it could control an A. […]