Antibiotics are molecules of biological warfare. Produced by bacteria and some fungi, in response to extracellular signals, antibiotics represent a diverse group of compounds that inhibit bacterial growth at different points and different stages of the life cycle. We will get around to antibiotic resistance, but in these few words ...
A few years ago, I heard an interesting thing from another mother when I picked my oldest daughter up from daycare. The other mother was suffering from a head cold and confessed to me her fear that she had become "antibiotic resistant." I found this statement pretty funny at the ...
This is a multi-part series on antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Eventually, we'll reach the ways in which bacteria develop antibiotic resistance, but before we get there, we'll spend a little more time on antibiotics themselves. What have we learned so far? 1. Antibiotics are natural products, made by bacteria and ...
The wind storms and heavy rains that hit Seattle a few years ago, and flooded the Battery Street tunnel, demonstrated why a bypass mechanism can be a helpful thing - for both bacteria and motorists. When the weather is nice, I bike to work. But when the weather gets bad ...
What's the difference between a synthetic drug and an antibiotic? Sometimes there's no difference at all. Let's take a look at chloramphenicol and couple of pencillins. Chloramphenicol kills many different kinds of bacteria by interfering with their ability to make new proteins. Here's a point where language gets tricky. Originally ...
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 ...
Blogging from the NW ASM branch meeting, part II Yesterday, I wrote about the some of present (and future) methods that are (or will be) used in clinical labs to identify pathogenic microbes. In these next two posts, I want to describe the talks I attended on antibiotic resistance, from ...
During the past few Fridays (or least here and here), we've been looking at a paper that was published from China with some Β-lactamase sequences that were supposedly from Streptococcus pneumoniae. The amazing thing about these particular sequences is that Β-lactamase has never been seen in S. pneumoniae before, making ...
One time I was watching a football game on TV and they had a short quiz, called "You make the call" or something like that, and you had to watch a play and pretend to be a referee. A short video clip showed football players falling over each other. Then ...
There are five ways that I know of that allow bacteria to escape death. I call these t he five paths to antibiotic resistance 1. Persistence is resistance: Most antibiotics kill by acting on the metabolic pathways needed for bacteria growth. Ironically, bacteria can survive by not growing. Read more ...
In the class that I'm teaching, we found that several PCR products, amplified from the 16S ribosomal RNA genes from bacterial isolates, contain a mixed base in one or more positions. We picked samples where the mixed bases were located in high quality regions of the sequence (Q >40), and ...
Ribosomes are molecular machines that build new proteins. This process of synthesizing a protein is also known as translation. Many antibiotics prevent translation by binding to ribosomal RNA. In the class that I'm teaching, we're going to be looking at ribosome structures to see if the polymorphisms that we find ...
When finding a female scientists' data turns into an archeological treasure hunt. A few months ago, I decided it would be interesting to celebrate various scientific contributions by making images of chemical / molecular structures in the Molecule World iPad app and posting them on Twitter ( @MoleculeWorld). Whenever I ...
