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by semi-extrinsic 3903 days ago
The cool thing about the modern way of approaching natural products is that it's reaching far beyond what traditional herbal medicine is able to. Case in point, I heard of a promising new antibiotic that originated from a soil bacterium found in a random grassy field in the US somewhere. The latest edition of Foreign Policy has a good piece on these things.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teixobactin

The origin of that antibiotic is notable for the new method of culturing the soil bacteria in situ, but antibiotics from soil bacteria are not new. Most antibiotics with a name ending in "mycin" were isolated from soil bacteria.