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New Method Targets Antibiotic Resistance

Posted on: Wednesday, 25 April 2007, 18:00 CDT

Bacteria become resistant to drugs by forming colonies called biofilms, a finding which may help U.S. doctors retool antibiotics to work again.

Kenneth Bayles and his colleagues at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha explained that when biofilms are forming, an unusual number of bacteria in the colony explode, or commit suicide in a process called lysis, contributing their DNA and other nutritious cellular bioproducts to the bacteria that remain.

These fortified bacteria become superbugs that can resist the attempts of antibiotics to turn on the bacteria's programmed life-cycle death mechanisms called apoptosis.

The researchers said they hope that by finding out what prompts the suicide bacteria to die, they will be able to turn the normal cell death program back on and make bacteria sensitive to antibiotics again.

They noted that up to this point scientists have viewed bacteria as isolated, simplistic organisms that did not relate to, or interact with each other.

The recognition that the biofilm colony cues lysis in groups of its cells has allowed scientists to understand that bacterial reactions are much more complex than they realized and their social signals may provide targets for therapeutic interventions in the future.

A report on the research is published in the April 23 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source: United Press International

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