Do other organisms make antibiotics?
As far as I can tell, most of the commercially produced antibiotics are made by bacteria, fungi, and a bit chemistry (more on that in a moment).
It appears, however, that compounds with antimicrobial properties are made by just about everything. Just to make things complicated, these molecules are sometimes called "antibiotics" in the literature and sometimes they're not. Many of the molecules with antimicrobial activity are short peptides–chains of amino acids between 10 and 50 residues long (1 ... Read more
