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tyrothricin

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Tyrothricin is an antibiotic mixture which was isolated from Brevibacillus brevis by Rene Dubos in the late 1930s. It was later shown by Dubos and Rollin Hotchkiss to be a mixture of two different antibiotics: gramicidin and tyrocidine.

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Tyrothricin is an antibiotic mixture which was isolated from Brevibacillus brevis by Rene Dubos in the late 1930s. It was later shown by Dubos and Rollin Hotchkiss to be a mixture of two different antibiotics: gramicidin and tyrocidine.

Both gramicidin and tyrocidine are short polypeptides which disrupt the cell membranes of some, primarily Gram-positive, bacteria. Tyrothricin and its component antibiotics are too toxic to be taken internally but are sometimes used as topical antibiotics.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “tyrothricin” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.