Scientists watch as bacteria evolve antibiotic resistance

[Spinnor]

From, https://www.sciencenews.org/article/scientists-watch-bacteria-evolve-antibiotic-resistance

For bacteria, practice makes perfect: Adjusting to ever higher levels of antibiotics preps them to morph into super resistant strains, and scientists can now watch it happen. A new device — a huge petri dish coated with different concentrations of antibiotics — makes this normally hidden process visible, microbiologist Michael Baym and colleagues report in the Sept. 9 Science. The setup gives a step-by-step picture of how garden-variety microbes become antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

“As someone who’s studied evolutionary biology for a long time, I think it has a real wow factor,” says Sam Brown, a microbiologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta who wasn’t involved in the study. The bacteria are “climbing this impossible mountain of antibiotics.” ...

 

[Fervent Freyja]

Great experiment! Thanks for sharing!
This reminds me of a paper I read recently: Antibiotic resistance: a physicist’s view

We believe that this is just the beginning. Many questions remain to be addressed about how bacteria respond (and become resistant) to antibiotics, and physicists have an important role to play in this effort. As a first example, it is imperative to gain better understanding of how bacterial cells interact mechanically with one another and with their environment. Mechanical interactions appear to be very important in bacterial self-assembly50–53, yet our limited knowledge of these interactions prevents us from building accurate models of how spatially structured infections like bacterial biofilms form. As a second example, horizontal gene transfer – the transmission of genes encoding antibiotic resistance between (potentially) unrelated bacteria by direct transfer of DNA – has been little studied in a “physics” context54,55, yet it is very important in clinically relevant antibiotic-resistant infections. It would be very interesting to investigate how physical factors such as the forces existing between adjacent bacterial cells in a colony or biofilm affect the rate of gene transfer56 .