Here is one for the classroom, by the way. Boy, here's fun for one you can do in the classroom. Garlic, maybe you've done this. Get a sliver of garlic and make a lawn of bacteria on agar. Stick the garlic in the center. Son of gun, there is an active ingredient in garlic that will kill the bacteria. It makes a pretty big zone. This was part of our workshop for teachers (Woods Hole, MA) this summer. There I was with the mind of a microbiologists, right. They've got E. coli cells on the agar plate. E. coli produces a distinctive odor so you can check it. I lift up the lid of the agar plate and I'm going to check to make sure they've got the right culture, E. coli. What does it smell like? Garlic! So, I had to take their word for it that it was E. coli. But that's kind of an interesting, very simple experiment that you can do to show that some plant products do have inherent antibacterial activity. By the way, that active agent is described in the literature. I've forgotten just what it is but it is characterized.
Develop a better understanding of virulence. If we can understand why an organism produces disease, that virulence mechanism could be a target. We could go after that. Unfortunately, many, many of the pathogens that we're dealing with have multiple reasons for their virulence. There are multiple factors for virulence. One might destroy the red blood cells. Another one has hyaluronidase. Another one produces LPS. One organism produces all three or some other kinds that's produced. So that, even though it's an approach and you can identify targets, they could be very, very tough targets to inhibit, yielding a therapeutic response.
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