Wireless Messaging for Bacteria

An Anonymous Coward writes: "According to BBC's article, UK scientists discovered that bacteria have a capability of warning each other over air about new antidotes introduced and by doing so help to develop a resistance to antibiotics! Speaking of 802.11 standard amongst microbes! This is so twisted!"

Comments

Re:obvious?

[cp99]

1. For the airborne "messages" to be sent, I'm assuming that the E.coli cultures were in open air, and not in water. So each side of the divider was pretty much in the same system.

They were in a petri dish which had a dividing wall cutting it into two sections. There was a 5 mm gap between the dividing wall and the roof, so they weren't exactly in "open air"

2. If "pheremones" were able to cross through the gap, then the antibiotics should have been able to also.

To the best of my knowledge, antibiotics can't migrate through the air (there may be a few varities which can, but the vast majority can't), so they shouldn't migrate across the barrier.

If you have an ammount of antibiotics x, and another number of E.coli y, then you will have the ratio of antibiotits to bacterium x/y. If x is a large number compared to y, then the E.coli have small chance of survival... more "poision" per cell. But if you were increase y, then the ammount of "poision" per cell decreases in the system, thus improving the chance for each individual cell to survive.

This isn't exactly how the bacteria survive. Generally only a small amount of antibiotics is needed to kill a bacteria infection. However a tiny minority of bacteria (maybe one in a billion) will mutate (or already possess the mutation) so it is immune to the antibiotics. These bacteria will either repopulate the petri dish with their clones, or pass on the mutation to other non-clones (bacteria commonly swap genetic material) allowing them to survive. Therefore it isn't a simple x/y ratio.