What do you get when you pit two bacteria in a death ring match? Researchers at MIT did this for their amusement, which they claim was research, and found out the winner uses a unique weapon to dominate its opponent.

Professor Anthony Sinskey’s laboratory at MIT was doing a weekly bacteria battle royale fight when they noticed that the soil-dwelling bacteria, Rhodococcus, who always loses these fights, won. Kazuhiko Kurosawa, postdoctoral associate, was intrigued by the winner’s fighting spirit and decided to try and stress the bacteria by placing it in different environments to see if it would produce any new antibiotics, it did not. Finally, Kurosawa decided to pit the bacteria in more death-match fights against a new competitor, Streptomyces. Normally Streptomyces produces an antibiotic which kills other bacteria but this time around Rhodococcus did the killing by making its own antibiotic.

The researchers realized these games had actually produced a new compound which they isolated and called rhodostreptomycin. This new antibiotic proved be very effective against other strains of bacteria such as Helicobacter pylori, the now famous bacteria which is known to cause stomach ulcers. More amazing is that this new antibiotic, an aminoglycoside, is actually a novel new molecule, it has a ring structure which has never been seen before. This new structure could be used as a building block for newer antibiotics, something that the medical community is in dire need of with the recent stories on Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and multidrug-resistant Tuberculosis. This battle royale technique could be used to make more antibiotics that have previously been undiscovered, the only step left is for MIT to stream the fights over the Internet so everyone can enjoy the action.