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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.
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.
Which is exactly what you want when you're investigating / demonstrating a single process.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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You use your computer because of Boole and Babbage, both avowed Christians.
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.
So was your post a sarcastic joke, or are you actually one of those anti-science fools?
I can't tell as you write the exact same things they do.
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.
We remember these people for what they contributed to mankind, not for their superstitions.
Newton was into alchemy (and religion). I'd say he has wasted the rest of his life with it. But hey, it was his life so he got to spend it like he wanted it. I didn't have any right that he'd spend it the way I would have liked it anyway. But still, what a waste.
Bert
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?...
Poe's Law in all it's glory.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Smart people are very good at rationalizing things they came to believe for not-very-smart reasons. That's why you gotta get the parents to brainwash the kids before they develop their critical thinking skills.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Too bad a bunch of other avowed Christians were likely responsible for cutting Turing's life in half. Also, I'll give you Babbage, but Boole was leaning hard towards deist.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
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And some priest ended up with a kernel of corn on his knob after documenting Richard Dawkins' Petri dish
And how did they know this, eh? Oh, wait! Sure, there was this really old collection of legends and myths, and they could see it was obviously true, because it correlated so very well with experience.
Boole's own algebra, axiomatically derived by Richard Cox and converted into a sound basis for epistemology by a number of people especially E. T. Jaynes, can be used to show that their views, unsupported by anything like reliable evidence, were extremely unlikely to be true given the evidence.
But hey, these guys were, oh, a thousand times smarter than you (whatever that means) and could prove that their views were not superstitions. Mostly because they were a way of separating provisional knowledge into probably true and probably false categories using Bayesian reasoning incorporated into the axiomatically derived probability algebra of Laplace and Boole, justifying probability theory as both "The Logic of Science" (Jaynes) and incidentally, the basis for human knowledge all the way down at the level of "how the brain works".
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
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.
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.
I don't understand how this can be evolution.
Not sure if that's "don't understand" or "don't want to understand", but I'll assume the first and try to explain as well as I can.
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.
Let's go for the 'stronger muscles', and put some specific evolutional pressure on that. You're right that there is a natural variation in how strong people are. In one generation, picking the stronger people isn't evolution, yet. But let's scale up this petri dish thing to human scale. Let's take an uninhabited Earth-like planet, with several empty islands, all habitable, and an alien scientist that drops a few million people on island #1. It's a nice island, but eventually it gets a bit crowded. If you're a really, really good swimmer, you might make it to the next island, but there's a very strong current in the wrong direction, and the evil alien scientist will prevent you from cheating by building a canoe. As the island gets severely overpopulated, many people desperately attempt to make it to the next island. Most of them drown. But a few hundred years later, island #2 is populated by the descendants of the best swimmers from island #1. Now, the same thing happens - except the current to island #3 is even stronger, and it isn't reachable except for those who have a truly remarkable talent for swimming. Eventually, island #3 is reached by a few people. It gets populated by descendants from a man with Marfan syndrome, and a woman with polydactylism. Unfortunately, both happen to be colourblind too. We're now two islands further. Eventually, a few thousand years in to the future, the last island gets populated. The population consists of people with extremely long and strong arms, on average 6.2 fingers on each hand - often with skin between them - and exceptionally short legs. They're all colourblind and, frankly speaking, usually not too bright. But they sure can swim fast.
Since when having bigger muscles is considered evolution?
Compare the normal people from island #1 with those from the last island. Are they still people? Sure, we'd recognise them as such, and (biological criterium) they could reproduce with normal people. Are they different? That too. A few thousand years of selection for being able to swim against the current surely has had some effects on them.
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
Evolution doesn't necessarily mean a species transforms into another species. That's a relatively big step and nature takes its time. It does occur occasionally, but you'd probably have to try millions of petri dish experiments over a many years to even see that once.
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
Right... because in the wild bacteria acquire antibiotic resistance through ingesting magic fairy dust?
This sort of experiment does tend to accelerate things dramatically by removing most other evolutionary pressures, but doesn't fundamentally change either the outcome or the mechanisms at work. A hospital presents much the same environment - graduated regions of ambient antibiotics and lots of food. The biggest difference is that there's lots of other species of microbe they're competing with. And when someone else is eating the food you need to survive, it doesn't really matter if they're a member of your species or not, it's really only having things trying to eat you (including host immune systems) that are different.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
In retrospect, I agree with you, I shouldn't have phrased it that way. I noticed you used the word 'they' - why is that? AFAIK, it's only one AC asking.
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
But results can't be inferred to be the same as outside, which is why it is the headline that is misleading.
It shows how bacteria can quickly become superbugs in the right environment. Even in a less than ideal environment, it only has to evolve once to jump to the next person and unlike in this experiment, they are generally going to be surrounded by lots of environments(people) with no antibiotics in their system.
Wrong. First of all, recessive genes only happen when you have sexual reproduction, where two sets of genes combine, not in bacteria, where the gene is either there when the bacteria splits into two almost-identical bacteria, or not.
Second, if some of the bacteria originally possessed the genes which enabled it to survive 1000x concentration of the antibiotic, you would see a streak as that bacterial strain immediately spread into all the bands. The pauses at each concentration boundary show that no strain existed that could do it, until a mutation provided it.
Duct tape + WD40 => DevOps
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?
[Sigh] for the third and final time of writing, your question is answered in the paper. It is trivial to find the paper.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
The "landscape" of different concentrations of antibiotics in the MEGA-dish provides the test of thickness. The bacteria don't (on the timescale involved) diffusively move by more than a few millimetres on this metre-scale Petri dish. So the spread of colonies by tens of millimetres to tens of centimetres is accomplished by mummy (or daddy) bacteria loving other bacteria very much ... oh, sorry, no - completely ignoring each other ... and producing little baby bacteria which can survive in the hostile antibiotic landscape if they have the right mutation.
That differential survival of offspring is what defines "fitness". Fitness is always local to the environment. It doesn't have any predictive ability, otherwise the ancestors of humans who live 100 millennia now (i.e. your children, should you choose to have any) would already be developing the "fitness" they'll need to survive by breathing vacuum.
Are you one of those people who believes in an invisible sky fairy to justify your existence, and your fear of homosexual marriage?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
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?
Actually, hospitals are full of strains of resistant bacteria that only exist in hospitals. Understand: studies have shown that the same strains exist in hospitals all over the country. They don't come pouring out, though. There are also resistant strains "in the wild" (outside the relatively controlled hospital environments) but they are not the same as the ones in the hospitals.
Breakfast served all day!
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?