How Bacteria Eat Penicillin

Noted: “Basically, if you look for it it’s there in when it comes to bacterial degradation of compounds. . . . Somebody out there will degrade just about everything,” says Jo Handelsman, a microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I don’t think that penicillin-producing strains of Penicillium are absolutely ubiquitous in soil, so it is kind of interesting that it is easy to find these degraders, even though they may not individually have encountered penicillin before.”