Many of the antibiotics used today were developed from natural products made by bacteria themselves in order to ward off other bacteria. These products used to be sought and found primarily in soil. Now, Julia Vorholt and Jörn Piel of the Institute of Microbiology at ETH Zurich have turned to a totally different ecosystem: the leaves of plants. As part of the National Research Programme “Antimicrobial Resistance” (NRP 72) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the researchers are investigating bacterial strains from the leaf surface of Arabidopsis thaliana, or thale cress, which grows in the wild.
