With this in mind it is possible to see why scientists have chosen this name for an encyclopedia that analyses all bacteria causing hospital infections.
This idea of listing all characteristics of every single bacterium responsible for hospital infections started at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. They decided to catalogue the DNA sequence of each and every single bacterium in such a way that it will be possible to compare it with those already present in a database. This process will be fundamental in helping to understand the history of the infection and what caused it.
In this way it should be easier to decide what antibiotic to prescribe to cure the infection as some bacteria have now developed a high resistance to some of them.
Many pharmaceutical companies are also adhering to this program to help create antibiotics able to wipe out any sort of infection.
This however is only one of the options that university research is exploring...
Another breakthrough discovery arrived from the university of Parma, in Italy, where researchers unlocked the principle behind dental caries sequencing the entire bacterium responsible, the Bifidobacterium dentium. It was hard to understand how a bacterium that is normally located in the intestine could survive in the oral cavity: by analysing its genes, it was seen how instead it could metabolise sugars in the saliva and resist to the active ingredients of toothpaste and cause damage to the teeth.
From all of these researches was born Alcatraz - the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea. Ideally this encyclopedia will manage to list all microorganisms present on the earth collecting data on each one's DNA...
One would hope that security would make it more difficult to "escape" from there than from the real Alcatraz!
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