Penicillium notatum

Penicillium notatum , also known under the name of Penicillium chrysogenum , is one of microscopic mushroom of the kind Penicillium , famous to be at the origin of discovered of the Pénicilline by the doctor Alexander Fleming. Penicillium is known to be the green mould blue which one finds on the bread or the fruits mildewed like on certain cheeses.

Discovered Penicillin

See also: Discovered Penicillin

The September 3rd 1928, Doctor Fleming then 47 years old, returns from holidays and finds its laboratory of Saint-Mary' S Hospital in London. It finds the boxes of Pietri then where it made push cultures of Staphylocoque S with an aim of studying the bacterial anti effect of the Lysozyme S, a variety of enzyme being in the tears and saliva. He with the bad surprise to see its limps invaded by cotonneuses colonies of mould of a greenish white. They were contaminated by the stocks of a mushroom microcospic, the Penicillium notatum , which its neighbor of straw mattress uses, a young Irish mycologist, Charles J. Latouche, who works on this mushroom species, which involves allergies among asthmatic patients.

Whereas it must disinfect these contaminated boxes, Fleming realizes that around the colonies of mould, there exists a circular zone in which the staphilococcus did not push. It puts forth the assumption that a substance secreted by mushroom of it is responsible and gives him the penicillin name.

The following year, in 1929, it publishes in the " British Newspaper off Experimental Pathology " the first report of the effect of this substance, thinking that its action is of the same type as that of the lysozyme. " During work with various staphilococca a certain number of cultures were put of dimensioned and were examined from time to time. During the examination, these cultures were exposed to the air and were sown by various micro-organisms. It was noticed that around a large mushroom colony polluting the colonies of staphilococca had become transparent and without any doubt in the process of dissolution. " .

" The penicillin used in massive amounts is neither toxic nor irritating… it can constitute, by applications or in injections, an effective disinfectant against the microbes " .

Craddock and Ridley, his/her collaborators, try to isolate and purify Penicillin but in vain. Fleming is interested little in a therapeutic application of its discovery and uses especially the extracts of this Penicillium to manufacture selective mediums.

Some therapeutic clinical trials are carried out all the same but without much success. The discovery of Flemimg interests little world, it will seek other producing antibiotic micro-organisms but it will not publish its work.

It is necessary to await ten years before Penicillin does not reconsider the front of the scene. It is in 1939, that Howard Walter Florey, British pathologist, and Ernst Boris Chain, biochemist and pathologist of German origin, succeeded in isolating the active agent from penicillin. In 1945, these three men (Fleming, Florey and Chain) share the Nobel Prize of medicine for their work penicillin and his therapeutic application.

See too

Sources

the discovery of Fleming, and the share of the chance
Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin, on www.herodote.net
Of mushrooms and the men on www.myco-haut-rhin.com

References

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