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Lariocidin: a novel antibiotic that disrupts bacterial protein synthesis

Published on September 30, 2026   8 min

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Interviewer: Today we're speaking with Prof. Gerry Wright, who recently published a Nature paper describing the discovery of lariocidin, a novel lasso peptide antibiotic that targets bacterial ribosomes with significant therapeutic potential. Gerry, thank you so much for joining us today. Prof. Wright: It's my pleasure. Thanks for asking. Interviewer: Can you start by sharing how you came to discover this antibiotic and what makes it a distinctive and promising antibiotic candidate? Prof. Wright: I'm sure everyone listening to this probably remembers that most antibiotics that are in clinical use today have their origins in the microbial universe. That is, they come from bacteria and fungi that have been living in the environment on the planet for billions of years, and that's been a remarkable source of new antibiotics, so that's how we got penicillin and erythromycin, tetracycline and all the antibiotics for the most part come from this source. Very few of them actually come from synthetic compounds that have been produced by chemists in the lab. This source has been overmined, as people have thought over the years, and no new classes of antibiotics from this source were discovered post-1980s; so there was a thought that it was going to be difficult to find new antibiotics from this source. But we decided that given that the synthetic route mining chemicals that are produced in the lab was not producing any new antibiotics either, let's go back to this source. So we set up a program in the lab to start to mine, in a different way, some of these organisms that live in the environment. In the case of lariocidin, we discovered an antibiotic. It was produced by an organism

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Lariocidin: a novel antibiotic that disrupts bacterial protein synthesis

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