Question: What do you grow antibiotics from ?

David Walker-Sünderhauf answered on 13 Mar 2019: last edited 13 Mar 2019 5:27 pm

Great question. First off, personally I don’t do any of this: I go onto a website that sells scientific equipment, add any antibiotics I need to my shopping cart, and click order now! 🙂
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Most antibiotics are found in natural sources: for example, the first antibiotic Penicillin is produced by a fungus to fight off bacteria. In the early years, antibiotics were produced exactly from these natural sources, by growing the fungus, or whichever microorganism produces the antibiotic in large batches and then extracting the product.
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Nowadays, this is somewhat refined by growing microorganisms that produce the antibiotic in large fermenting containers, and extracting & chemically purifying the antibiotic. Additionally, some antibiotics are semi-synthetic, so chemically modified after extraction.
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Finally, there are some antibiotics that are purely synthetic: they are chemically produced in the lab, I’m afraid I don’t know a lot about the chemical side of production!