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Video Shows How Bacteria Invade Antibiotics And Transform Into Superbugs (npr.org)
guises writes: By making a giant petri dish out of bands of increasingly antibiotic-laced agar, a couple of microbiologists have created a means to watch bacterial evolution as it happens: colonies introduced to the dish expand to fill the areas in which they can survive and then mutate and spread into the areas in which they can not. It takes only eleven days for the bacteria to evolve sufficient resistance to survive in an area with a thousand times the concentration of antibiotics that would have killed the original colonies. And it makes a pretty neat video.
Evolution doesn't exist. The antibiotics just lose their effectiveness over time. These "scientists" are going to hell for preaching falsehoods.
Yeah, but how many of them survived the incinerator? Or just pour some bleach into the dish.
It wasn't wasted. They just created a new condiment for Chipotle restaurants.
Adaptation depends on growth rate and exposure level - a petri dish is an artificial environment devoid of competing forces.
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If the editors did their job properly, it wouldn't be slashdot :)
has anyone compared the DNA of the final generations to determine if they are genetically identical or radically different?
Bacteria do not evade antibiotics, they die and quite simply those that are not affected by the particular anti-biotic survive and reproduce. As the bacteria are relatively simple and they DNA is also relatively simply, they can only be resistant to a limited number of potential antibiotics, so new anti-biotics mixes can simply be many older ones mixed together, don't kill the bacteria with one, kill it with the other, they could also add in immune system supplements to power up the immune system in conjunction with the anti-biotic mix. As the anti-biotic mix could be quite a large dose, it would be better that side affects do not compound but impact the body in different ways, so many smaller side affects rather than compounding side affects.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Among other things, to analyse the resultant resistant strains and how they developed their resistance. Doing such things they have found that there's no one method to develop resistance. That kind of data and testing has also been used to develop new methods to help fight the resistant strains, though of course, they eventually adapt to those as well since none of our methods are 100% effective at wiping them out, thus there is always the possibility to develop resistance.
The didn't invade or evade the antibiotic, they just became resistant to it. But yes, I agree, the article has a poorly written title.
It wasn't just slashdot, that's the title of the article slashdot linked to.
Now you know why your doctor says take all the pills in the prescription. You want to be at 1000, not 1.
Just read the article and watched the video. The video has areas that have no antibiotics that's where the bacteria start. Further in areas have higher concentrations of antibiotics. The bacteria colonizes into the antibacteria areas they are literally invading the antibiotic material / area.
Notice the insanely fast way evolution can occur when given the opportunity? See all that plastic you have? It's full of energy, if you burn it it makes a lot of heat. It's not a lot more complicated than cellulose to digest.
So bacteria will evolve to eat it and already are:
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-bacteria-eat-plastic-20160310-story.html
So we had antibiotics for 100 years, and plastics for about the same.
Phew, glad you solved this whole resistance thing.
They do the same thing in hospitals with humans. They keep people with no immune systems loaded up with antibiotics to ward off the infections hospitals contain. This is a perfect environment for pathogens to evolve antibiotic resistance in human petri dishes, until a critical mass is reached and the superbugs come pouring out of the hospitals.
That depends on how slowly they were fed into the incinerator or how slowly the concentration of bleach was raised.
True to some extent, sadly there aren’t that many classes of antibiotics kown. Resistance to a single class is developed relatively easily, and can work against tens of brands of antibiotics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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This is both funny and or informative, mod parent up
Bacteria "evade" and not "invade" antibiotics.
They did indeed invade the part of the petri dish that was laced with antibiotics. After developing resistance there was no need for them to evade it.
I don't understand how this can be evolution.
To me, production of a drug resistant bacteria is analogous to having a child with stronger muscles that can beat the stronger wood at each section.
Since when having bigger muscles is considered evolution?
When you say evolution, i expect to see bacteria transforming to not bacteria but some other form, algea for example.
please correct me if i am wrong
Keep in mind, one resistant bacteria in one person, gets reported. But one plastic bottle breaking down in a garbage heap by bacteria, doesn't get noticed. So there will be loads of bacteria strains eating plastic that simply go unnoticed.
And the places you'd expect to find those would be wherever plastic exists in abundance in a mangled state. i.e. tips.
even if they go out and do harm, we should focus on teaching them not to rape blonde swedish women and all would be right
it's a good thing that nobody's dumb enough to routinely dose cattle and chicken and other livestock with anti-biotics. that would enable resistant bugs to evolve and spread everywhere.
This video also may show how bacteria grow on a medium after antibiotic degraded to concentration which is no longer effective. Antibiotics are known to be not very stable substances. Two weeks at 37 deg C incubator (E. coli optimal growth temperature) may have degraded the antibiotic. Did the researchers check antibiotic concentration after two weeks? You will never know as the the article is paywalled, even though your taxes probably paid for this research. After nearly 700 generations (E. coli has a cell division rate of about once every 30 minutes) is not surprising that "multiple coexisting lineages diversified both phenotypically and genotypically". Heh, I am not convinced, at least not yet.
Nature deals with the evolution of bacteria around the toxins of natural organisms. Now they must ask how does penicillin mold deal with the evolution of the bacteria its toxin destroys.
E Proelio Veritas.
I see nothing in the researcher's methodology that verifies the traits for resistance were the result of random mutations. The antibiotic resistance traits could have always been present, but recessive. More importantly, there were no tests for actual fitness -- a requirement for evolution. Antibiotic resistance may come at the expense of other traits more important to long-term survival, such as, for example, the ability to tolerate seasonal temperature changes. Like the silly Dawkins Weasel Shakespeare incremental computer "recreation" of evolution, this is another example of Just Bad Science.
OK, I can see how this could be used to create strains of bacteria resistant to a large number of antibiotics. Don't see that as a practical activity for most people.
As I have no current plans to become a bio-terrorist, this technique isn't terribly useful to me in its current form.
Could it be adapted somehow, perhaps to turn federal judges and/or bureaucrats and other such life-forms into productive members of society?
If I come up with something, I'll post it here. K?
[mutters] Take a really big petri dish, and put stripes of something across it, and put the test subjects at one end. But stripes of what? Maybe ... [muttering becomes unintelligible]
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
A symposium on new vaccine techniques, interesting in light of TFA (could be adapted to work against some bacteria as well as viruses):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Starts in a ways, IIRC at about 12 minutes.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
This is incredibly wasteful. We know that bacteria are developing antibiotic resistance and that it's a big problem. Why would you help bacteria develop more antibiotic resistance, especially for a video? This is an asinine waste of antibiotics and contributes to the danger of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
OK, maybe you saw the original snarky submission title "Submission: Scientists create invincible super bacteria in order to make a cool video":
I'm sure the actual presentation title is a bit more realistic.. "WATCH: Bacteria Invade Antibiotics And Transform Into Superbugs". And it wasn't wasted. The article comes out with some surprising conclusions, such as, it being discovered that previously impossible studying of bacterial progress was now possible with the 4 foot petri dish, and the even more surprising discovery that the faster growing non-resistant bacteria choke off the superbugs, which is very useful knowledge..
It wasn't done "just" to make a video.. it's just mr snarky's submission byline that implies such.. WHen will people Ever grow up, I wonder?
Apologies for being uninformed, but is this selection or selection+mutation? Since the article mentions mutation, do they show that there were no original bacteria that had the resistance but were perhaps slower growing? It certainly seems after the first band that some bacteria simply kept growing. How is mutation evidenced and how to tell it apart from selection please?
the faster growing non-resistant bacteria choke off the superbugs, which is very useful knowledge..
Sorry for my bad English, but I don't understand what you meant by this?
Could not watch the video, the media did not run in just purchased Windows 10 and IE11. But from the description of the video I think... that the reply is CANNIBALLY. Mind that in vitro and in vivo tests run differently because in vivo there are many more factors to affect the result. So in vitro... bacteria die as they touch the antibiotic, then retreat, then start growing again over the antibiotic, **evolving**... Calling this evolution is a strong word though, unbound reproduction from resistant individuals is much easier to understand. But the fact is in vitro if the dead bacteria culture is not removed, newer bacteria have to assimilate the produce of the dead bacteria over the antibiotics. This gives them a unique opportunity, that of feeding/assimilating INTACT ELEMENTS of their own makeup! Antibiotics will destroy this or that function through certain mechanisms expressed as molecules and their interactions, so they will not be present in the next culture feeding substrate giving the bacteria feedback as to what elements in their environment are useful and which ones are not. Say, all lysine is destroyed by the antibiotic, feeding substrate will have less lysine, THEN new bacteria generation can **learn** not to use lysine in their makeup! This is easier said than done or explained... but the logic is standard. Information is provided by assimilating the remains of the previous, antibiotic killed generation. This is at least a testable hypothesis, otherwise we risk throwing away good antibiotics because there was no maid in the culture and the kids learned to thrive among their own corpses and agar interaction food... :)