Antibiotic-resistant bacteria is one of the most pressing public health crises of the coming decades, but an innovative new approach using gold atoms might hold the key to fighting back.
might not have the kind of high profile that something like Anthrax has, but in real world terms, these bacteria are responsible for far more deaths, so their growing antibiotic resistance is alarming. These new findings can't come at a better time.Gold atoms have some very exciting properties that we can enlist in our fight against germs.
If you have genes that are better suited for an environment, you are more likely to prosper and reproduce, increasing the potency of the genetic marker that helped you survive in the first place. In the context of bacteria, we've been saturating the bacteriological kingdom with so many drugs that the small percentage that is naturally resistant to certain kinds of antibiotics are quickly coming to outnumber the bacteria that were susceptible to drugs.
Most antibiotics currently in existence are pretty old at this point, with many in use that have been around for decades. But as we use these life-saving medicines more and more, the bacteria we're trying to fight off get better at surviving a course of antibiotics while other, similar bacteria die. This process of distilling a trait in a single individual member of a population until it becomes the default trait for a species is how all life on Earth evolved.
The hearty survivors go on to reproduce at exponential rates, which increases the number of bacteria containing antibiotic-resistant genes and makes our medicines less effective — if they're effective at all. Given the way diseases that would only a few decades ago have been fatal in almost all cases can now be treated with a week's worth of antibiotics like it were little more than a cold, getting a handle on
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