Answer this question in under 200 words. Please do not copy and paste from outsi

Question

Answer this question in under 200 words. Please do not copy and paste from outside sources:

The President wants your advice. She can’t understand why the CDC Department of Fungal Disease Control is making such slow progress on discovering new antifungal chemicals for human disease therapy. “I know scientists are smart, but why is it so hard to give us new antifungal medicine?” she asks you. “Look--fungi are basically chubby bacteria, right? Why can’t we just blast ‘em with penicillin and cure the sick?” Tell her what she needs to know, addressing each of the issues (few new antifungals, chubby bacteria, penicillin) that she doesn’t understand.

Explanation / Answer

Answer:

Fungi are eukaryotic organisms that included microscopic yeasts (single celled microorganisms), molds and the mushrooms (multicellular organisms). The size of fungi are vary greatly depending on the type of the fungus.  The size of microscopic yeast are ranges from 2 to 10 micrometers. However, the larger fungi (molds hyphae) are ranges from 5 to 50 micrometers in size

Bacteria are single celled prokaryotic microorganisms having size ranging from 0.5 to 5 micrometers in length. The average size of fungi is ten times the size of bacteria, thus fungi can called as "chubby bacteria".

Penicillin is a group of -lactam antibiotics which are derived from Penicillium fungi.  Penicillin (first drug) act on bacterial cell wall (cell wall is a characterstic feature of most of prokaryotes) by inhibiting the formation of peptidoglycan cross-links, thus, gram positive bacteria (having peptidoglycan as a component of cell wall) are eventually killed. However, penicillin is not effective against fungi because fungus cell wall do not contain peptidoglycan, instead cell wall of fungi is composed of Glucan and Chitin and pencilin do not act on these.

The Antifungal Medicines are the drugs or chemical compounds which used to kill pathogenic fungi or inhibit their growth. The mode of action of these drugs are different.

The control of new fungal diseases (by discovering new antifungal chemicals for human disease therapy) is difficult as the fungus emerging the resistance against all the above mentioned three class of antifungal drugs, including the new class of antifungal drugs i.e. Echinocandins.

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