What are antibiotics made from? What are the actual ingredients?
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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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