Giant sloths and woolly mammoths: Mining past creatures’ DNA for future antibiotics

Cesar de la Fuente believes the next breakthrough antibiotic might come from animals that have been dead for thousands of years.

Since 2021, his lab here at the University of Pennsylvania has built algorithms to trawl genetic databases for protein fragments, called peptides, with microbe-squashing properties. They started with human DNA. But more recently, he’s looked deep into the fossilized past, hunting for potential drugs lurking in the code of Neanderthals, giant sloths and woolly mammoths, among other ancient animals.