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Rebecca Voelker
JAMA contributor

JAMA. 1998;280:1041.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

The discovery of an important mechanism that bacteria use to protect themselves against the onslaught of the human immune system could pave the way for the development of new antibiotics.

A study published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences described how flavohemoglobin, a bacterial protein, detoxifies nitric oxide that the immune system produces to help kill disease-causing microorganisms. "Bacteria vary enormously in their ability to defend themselves against nitric oxide," said Andrew Salzman, MD, of Children's Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati and a coauthor of the study. "But if you remove this protein from bacteria, you can kill them with almost nothing. They're exquisitely sensitive to nitric oxide."

Studies aimed at disabling the actions of flavohemoglobin, which the researchers renamed nitric oxide dioxygenase (NOD), could help introduce a new class of infection-fighting antibiotics, the researchers observed. Interestingly, they added, NOD is perhaps billions . . . [Full Text of this Article]