Mar-2019
Hamilton researchers say they’ve discovered how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics
Hamilton researchers say they have discovered how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, a finding they say could help combat the growing problem.
Maikel Rheinstadter, a physics professor with McMaster University, and Andree Khondker, an undergraduate biochemistry student, said they found bacteria fight off antibiotics by stiffening their cell membranes and changing the barrier’s electrical charge, becoming a less attractive target to the drugs.
“We’ve developed a technique that we could see how the antibiotics are trying to stab the bacterial cells,” Rheinstadter said of the research, which was recently published in Nature Communications Biology.
The team focused on polymyxin B, an antibiotic used when all other antibiotics have failed. A few years ago Chinese researchers discovered a gene that allows some bacteria to become resistant to the powerful drug.
“The big challenge that we are facing is that the drugs we used to treat diseases with are in the process of not working anymore because bacteria are becoming more and more resistant to these drugs,” said Rheinstadter, the lead author of the study.
Rheinstadter said the team used X-ray imaging in parallel with computer simulations to get molecular-level resolution to see how the polymyxin B interacts with the antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Their technique allowed them to view bacteria at a resolution one-millionth the size of a human hair.
They came at the problem with a physics perspective, using techniques often found in materials research, he said.
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