A new study published on Nature Biotechnology featured a programmable antibiotic that targets antibiotic resistance genes while leaving innocent microbes.

Luciano Marraffini from Laboratory of Bacteriology said that they instructed Cas9, a bacterial enzyme, to target a particular DNA sequence and cut it up.

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He added that this approach did not damage healthy microbes which keep resistance in check and prevent secondary infections.

According to researchers, the Cas9 is an enzyme that is part of a defense system that bacteria that protects against viruses.

They said that they were able to direct Cas9 to choose targets by engineering space sequences that match bacterial genes.

Researchers said that they inserted these sequences into a cell along with the Cas9 gene. By doing this, the cell's own machinery turned on the system.

Through this, they found out that Cas9 can kill cells or eradicate these target genes, while there are cases that it prevents a cell from having resistance cells.

David Bickard, one of the researchers, said that if Cas9 is programmed target from a bacterial genome it can kill the bacteria.

He said that they then selected a guide sequence that can selective kill a particular strain of microbe within a mixed population.

To test their findings, researchers targeted Staphylococus Aureus which is a strain of common skin and respiratory bacteria that were resistant to Kanamycin.

They said that Cas9 treatment is programed to target a part of a resistance gene that doesn't kill the kanamycin-susceptible Staph but kills the resistant gene that kills most of the resistant Staph.

Despite this, researchers still believe that there's still a need for an improvement to the delivery system of this antibiotic.

However, they believe that this new antibiotic could improve research on the complex populations of microbes in the body.

Researchers said that the human body is composed of microbial communities, and with programmable antibiotics they could eliminate harmful microbes to learn more of its effects in the body.