What are antibiotics made from? What are the actual ingredients?
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Depends. For example, penicillin is made by growing penicillium mold, which naturally produces penicillin. Then they might add some preservatives or stabilizers to it to make it shelf stable. But in general medicines contain organic ingredients and inorganic ingredients. Organic ingredients are typically by products from plants, animals, bacteria, etc. And inorganic materials are typically used to make the medicine stay together and easier to store and transport.
Depends. For example, penicillin is made by growing penicillium mold, which naturally produces penicillin. Then they might add some preservatives or stabilizers to it to make it shelf stable. But in general medicines contain organic ingredients and inorganic ingredients. Organic ingredients are typically by products from plants, animals, bacteria, etc. And inorganic materials are typically used to make the medicine stay together and easier to store and transport.
Depends. For example, penicillin is made by growing penicillium mold, which naturally produces penicillin. Then they might add some preservatives or stabilizers to it to make it shelf stable. But in general medicines contain organic ingredients and inorganic ingredients. Organic ingredients are typically by products from plants, animals, bacteria, etc. And inorganic materials are typically used to make the medicine stay together and easier to store and transport.
An antibiotic like amoxicillin is just a combination/arrangement of 16 carbon atoms, 19 hydrogen atoms, 3 nitrogen atoms, 5 oxygen atoms and a sulfur atom per molecule.
Compared to simple sugar (glucose), it only has the nitrogen and sulfur extra.
There is nothing inside it that your body doesn’t see on a daily basis – it’s based on the old penicillin mold you’ve probably heard of, but with select things taken out to simplify it.
It kills bacteria just because it can stick to their cell walls.
About 60 minutes after you’ve taken one of these tablets, half of it is already “eliminated”, meaning sweat, urine and/or breathing it out – 60 minutes later, another half is gone.
An antibiotic like amoxicillin is just a combination/arrangement of 16 carbon atoms, 19 hydrogen atoms, 3 nitrogen atoms, 5 oxygen atoms and a sulfur atom per molecule.
Compared to simple sugar (glucose), it only has the nitrogen and sulfur extra.
There is nothing inside it that your body doesn’t see on a daily basis – it’s based on the old penicillin mold you’ve probably heard of, but with select things taken out to simplify it.
It kills bacteria just because it can stick to their cell walls.
About 60 minutes after you’ve taken one of these tablets, half of it is already “eliminated”, meaning sweat, urine and/or breathing it out – 60 minutes later, another half is gone.
An antibiotic like amoxicillin is just a combination/arrangement of 16 carbon atoms, 19 hydrogen atoms, 3 nitrogen atoms, 5 oxygen atoms and a sulfur atom per molecule.
Compared to simple sugar (glucose), it only has the nitrogen and sulfur extra.
There is nothing inside it that your body doesn’t see on a daily basis – it’s based on the old penicillin mold you’ve probably heard of, but with select things taken out to simplify it.
It kills bacteria just because it can stick to their cell walls.
About 60 minutes after you’ve taken one of these tablets, half of it is already “eliminated”, meaning sweat, urine and/or breathing it out – 60 minutes later, another half is gone.
Antibiotics are a natural or artificial chemical that selectively kills bacteria and can be delivered into a living body without killing the patient. The first antibiotics (like penicillin) were identified as being produced by other living things – molds that were competing with bacteria for food, or plants that were preventing bacterial infection.
Other antibiotics were found – some were chemical modifications of existing antibiotics, others were identified by investigating the molecular functioning of bacteria.
This gives us a couple of approaches to mass production of antibiotics.
The first was used to produce penicillin – selection of the original mold, selective breeding to get higher output of penicillin, and large growth tanks from which penicillin was purified. This is slow, and during the first few trials of penicillin, they collected the urine of the patient to purify the excreted penicillin for reuse. Now, such biologically-sourced antibiotics would be synthesized in a production facility, or the genes for the antibiotic would be inserted into a suitable organism that can be grown easily and produces high yield output.
The second approach is synthesis from feedstock. Organic chemists use a variety of complex synthesis steps on various starting precursors (many initially extracted from crude oil as part of the refining process) to create the complex molecules that form antibiotics. This is faster than using genetically modified organisms to produce output, but can also be complex, delicate and dangerous – the conditions required for some organic chemistry reactions involve reactive chemicals and high temperatures. There may be multiple refining/cleaning steps and quality checking the end product is vital.
The actual medication you take will be an active antibiotic, usually a filler to bulk out the pill, maybe a release control coating or layers, and possibly additives that enhance or assist the antibiotic effects.
Antibiotics are a natural or artificial chemical that selectively kills bacteria and can be delivered into a living body without killing the patient. The first antibiotics (like penicillin) were identified as being produced by other living things – molds that were competing with bacteria for food, or plants that were preventing bacterial infection.
Other antibiotics were found – some were chemical modifications of existing antibiotics, others were identified by investigating the molecular functioning of bacteria.
This gives us a couple of approaches to mass production of antibiotics.
The first was used to produce penicillin – selection of the original mold, selective breeding to get higher output of penicillin, and large growth tanks from which penicillin was purified. This is slow, and during the first few trials of penicillin, they collected the urine of the patient to purify the excreted penicillin for reuse. Now, such biologically-sourced antibiotics would be synthesized in a production facility, or the genes for the antibiotic would be inserted into a suitable organism that can be grown easily and produces high yield output.
The second approach is synthesis from feedstock. Organic chemists use a variety of complex synthesis steps on various starting precursors (many initially extracted from crude oil as part of the refining process) to create the complex molecules that form antibiotics. This is faster than using genetically modified organisms to produce output, but can also be complex, delicate and dangerous – the conditions required for some organic chemistry reactions involve reactive chemicals and high temperatures. There may be multiple refining/cleaning steps and quality checking the end product is vital.
The actual medication you take will be an active antibiotic, usually a filler to bulk out the pill, maybe a release control coating or layers, and possibly additives that enhance or assist the antibiotic effects.
Antibiotics are a natural or artificial chemical that selectively kills bacteria and can be delivered into a living body without killing the patient. The first antibiotics (like penicillin) were identified as being produced by other living things – molds that were competing with bacteria for food, or plants that were preventing bacterial infection.
Other antibiotics were found – some were chemical modifications of existing antibiotics, others were identified by investigating the molecular functioning of bacteria.
This gives us a couple of approaches to mass production of antibiotics.
The first was used to produce penicillin – selection of the original mold, selective breeding to get higher output of penicillin, and large growth tanks from which penicillin was purified. This is slow, and during the first few trials of penicillin, they collected the urine of the patient to purify the excreted penicillin for reuse. Now, such biologically-sourced antibiotics would be synthesized in a production facility, or the genes for the antibiotic would be inserted into a suitable organism that can be grown easily and produces high yield output.
The second approach is synthesis from feedstock. Organic chemists use a variety of complex synthesis steps on various starting precursors (many initially extracted from crude oil as part of the refining process) to create the complex molecules that form antibiotics. This is faster than using genetically modified organisms to produce output, but can also be complex, delicate and dangerous – the conditions required for some organic chemistry reactions involve reactive chemicals and high temperatures. There may be multiple refining/cleaning steps and quality checking the end product is vital.
The actual medication you take will be an active antibiotic, usually a filler to bulk out the pill, maybe a release control coating or layers, and possibly additives that enhance or assist the antibiotic effects.
It depends on the particular drug. Penicillin, for example, is made by the mold *P. chrysogenum*, which produces it naturally when fermented in large tanks: the process is similar to making beer. Many antibiotics are produced this way, using different molds or sometimes bacteria.
Not all antibiotics are fermented, though. Some of them start with a fermented antibiotic, but then add additional ingredients. These are called semi-synthetic antibiotics. For example, if you have the right setup you can make ampicillin from penicillin and d-phenylglycine methyl ester, which is an amino acid similar to the ones that make up the proteins in our cells. Ampicillin, although it’s produced from penicillin, works better against different kinds of bacteria than penicillin does, which is part of why they’re both still useful.
There are also antibiotics that are made completely in the lab: synthetic antibiotics. For example, nalixidic acid, which is chemically related to chloroquine, starts with 2-AMINO-6-METHYLPYRIDINE (another one of those amino acids) and adds malonic acid (which occurs in many fruits and vegetables) and after a few more processes adds ethyl bromide (which is a scary chemical on its own, but the process of producing the antibiotic breaks it up into safer components, some of which are incorporated into the drug). This antibiotic, much like ampicillin, works better in different situations than penicillin does.
Please understand that I’ve grossly oversimplified the processes here. You can’t just throw these ingredients into a pot and expect them to work: much like cooking, there are other steps that need to be performed to make the reactions work right. But you seemed to be mostly concerned about the ingredients lists.
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