antibiotics

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 can, I like to ... Read more

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 this a rather significant (and possibly scary) discovery ... Read more

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 you were three possible calls that a refereee might make and asked to chose which was correct. After the commercial, the announcer would tell you which choice was right and explain why it was correct. I suppose this was a trick to make us watch the commercials, but I thought the game was kind of fun. My SciBling "Mike the Mad" had a great ... Read more

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 Xuan Qin and Fred Tenover (CDC), and some new things that I learned. How do bacteria survive when their human hosts take a lot of antibiotics? Children's ... Read more

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, (I consider rain and 69 mph winds to be BAD), I take the easy way out. On the day of the big windstorm, driving home was not so easy. A mudslide covered one of my usual paths, blocked two lanes on a very busy street, and stopped traffic well into the depths of the city. Since we had to get to a soccer ... Read more

There are five ways that I know of that allow bacteria to escape death. I call these the 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 about it.
2. The Star Wars Strategy: Destroy (or modify) the antibiotic before it destroys you.
3. Pump it out. ... Read more

 

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

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 some fungi. We have also learned about the difference between antibiotics and synthetic drugs. There isn't always a clear distinction since chemical groups can be added to antibiotics, making them partly synthetic ... Read more

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, chloramphenicol was isolated and purified from Streptomyces (a kind of bacteria). But, chloramphenicol is small and chemists are able to synthesize it. So even though we consider antibiotics to be natural products, they don't ... Read more

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, I think I already wrote quite a bit. Admittedly, some of these ideas need a bit of chewing, if they are to be properly digested. Already, I can imagine hands raised and questions waiting to be asked.

What are antibiotics made of? ... Read more