Quick Action Against Multi-Resistant Bacteria

Bacteria
Source: www.commons.wikimedia.org

Today’s world population is infected with the increased amount of bacterial infections as compared to those who lived 10 years before and during that time bacteria have learned to survive. Even they escape the same antibiotics from which they would usually die. In other words, now bacteria are not coming in handy anymore with many types of antibiotics. 

Many bacterial infections such as tuberculosis, gonorrhea, and staphylococcus aureus infections have shown to become nearly impossible to treat when they are caused by multi-drug-resistant bacteria.

Antibiotics function is to destroy or inhibit a specific part of the bacterium such as its growth, DNA formation and cell wall synthesis. Additionally, there are many other ways antibiotics are utilized to kill bacteria.

In order to combat multi-drug-resistant bacteria, researchers are finding ways to replace the old list of antibiotics with new one that will work in a different way.

The team of doctors under the patronage of Joseph Pogliano and Kit Pogliano from the University of California has tested if it was possible to quickly identify the bacteria by observing their shape, appearance and whether it was possible to identify which antibiotics class would be possible to target their structure. It was concluded that knowing the features of culprit bacteria can provide some clue on what type of antibiotics can be used to kill the bacteria. 

Bacterial cytological profiling 

A research was carried out in which Escherichia Coli (E. Coli) was used to study further the mechanism of already known antibiotics.
Various measurements like size, shape and everything were thoroughly observed. The findings were that the antibiotic list of the same class can be grouped together by a method called bacterial cytological profiling (BCP).

To test whether BCP can help differentiating the pathways or not, it was targeted by different antibiotics. The scientists put 18 known compounds to test the affectivity of BCP. They placed it into 3 separate groups of 10 and blindly exposed E. coli cells to each of them. BCP seemed able to assign correctly all 30 compounds to their exact cellular targets.

BCP is rendered as a single-step method to determine the cellular targets of various compounds or drugs. Thus BCP can help the scientist to distinguish between many bacteria and finding the exact antibiotic. 

Medicine holds a lot of promises for progress in the future and it will shine further if proper resources and valuable time is sacrificed which can result in greater discoveries.

Reference

Nonijuie P, Burkart M, Pogliano K, Prgliano J. Bacterial cytological profiling rapidly identifies the cellular pathways targeted by antibacterial molecules. Proc Natl Acad Sci 2013;110(40):16169-74. 

Wendelsdorf K. Method quickly assesses antibiotics [Internet].  2013 Sep 30 [Cited 2013 Oct 5]. Available from: http://www.nih.gov/researchmatters/september2013/09302013antibiotics.htm.

By:

Wajiha Hassan

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Keywords: Bacterial infections, Types of antibiotics, Antibiotics list, bacterial cytological profiling