Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Now you know why your doctor says take all the pills in the prescription. You want to be at 1000, not 1.
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.
It's not the title I submitted: "Scientists create invincible super bacteria in order to make a cool video"
Oh well, it bothers me more that they changed "couldn't" to "can not." Let it be known: I got the tense 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.