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WASHINGTON (AP) - Biologists reached back to elementary school to discover a promising new way to fight nasty bacteria: Apply the rules of grammar.
The unusual method to try to defeat drug-resistant microbes and anthrax borrows a page from "The Da Vinci Code" and the TV show "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation." Studying potent bacteria-fighters found in nature called antimicrobial peptides, biologists found that they seemed to follow rules of order and placement that are similar to simple grammar laws.
Using the new grammar-like rules for how these peptides work, scientists created 40 new artificial bacteria-fighters. They found that nearly half of them vanquished a variety of bacteria and two of them beat anthrax, according to a paper being published Thursday in the journal Nature.
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