Am I the only one who thought this part was weird? "And as if that were not enough, here’s the kicker. This was not some kind of massive high-throughput screen of the kind we so often hear about in biomedical research these days. The researchers tried this approach just once, in essentially their back yard, on a very small scale, and it STILL worked the first time. What that tells us is that it can work again—and aga…
Because they took it out for a short test drive and found a viable class of antibiotic compounds without really trying very hard. That is something that would have been expected to take years and a lot of money prior to their advance.
It isn't just antibiotics. There are groups using this and analogous methods based on the same conceptual breakthrough to mine the bacterial world for all sorts of stuff, and now their efforts are about a hundred times more effective and efficient.