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posted by chromas on Wednesday March 13 2019, @01:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the cat-and-mouse dept.

[R]esearchers at the University of California San Diego who combine experiments and mathematical modeling have discovered an unexpected mechanism that allows bacteria to survive antibiotics.

As described in the March 7 early online release of the journal Cell, Dong-yeon Lee, Maja Bialecka-Fornal and Gürol Süel of UC San Diego's Division of Biological Sciences, along with Leticia Galera-Laporta of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain), and colleagues discovered that bacteria defend themselves against antibiotics by controlling the uptake of alkaline metal ions. When under attack by antibiotics, bacteria were found to modulate magnesium ion uptake in order to stabilize their ribosomes -- the fundamental molecular machines of life that translate genes into proteins -- as a survival technique.

[...] The new findings lay the scientific groundwork for new ways to counteract antibiotic resistance.


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  • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Wednesday March 13 2019, @03:18AM (3 children)

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Wednesday March 13 2019, @03:18AM (#813573)

    uses Envz to pump out antibiotics too....

    I suspect this is common in all species that encounter antibiotics - trade efficiency of X for survival of Y.

    Evolution folks - "It just works" TM ;-)

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  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday March 13 2019, @09:38AM (2 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Wednesday March 13 2019, @09:38AM (#813640) Journal

    So, they met antibiotics earlier. Natural antibiotics, like penicillin. Or maybe there have been so many generations in so many hospitals, but personally I still think the current model of aimless mutation plus selection in a purely physical universe is missing something in terms of ways to store knowledge and/or awareness. All things that pertain to the natural, not the supernatural, so don't cite those enemies of rational thought, the atheists. (/flamebait)

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @10:28AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @10:28AM (#813655)

      DNA is used to store knowledge, if you want to think of it that way.

    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:07PM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:07PM (#813779) Journal

      Unhhh... penicillin is a natural antibiotic. So is tetracycline. Etc. Most human antibiotics are either natural antibiotics or small variants on same.

      That said, most of them also aren't frequently encountered at high concentration in natural environments, so the selection pressure in favor of variants that express ways of dealing with them are small. Until people start using those antibiotics, when the ones that can't handle the antibiotics die off, and the next generation is all from the bacteria that survived. (Do note, however, that many bacteria can share genes not only within the species, but between species. And not only between generations, but within a single generation.)

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