Blog #5

Antibiotic resistance is a global crisis that is of great concern today because if it continues, antibiotics will be essentially ineffective in the coming years leaving the world with no treatment for bacterial infections. This crisis has largely been caused medical providers prescribing antibiotics for infections that they should not have killing off all of the normal microbiota and leaving the resistant bacteria to replicate further. Personally, I have even fallen into this line of ignorant thinking as a patient because I had not been educated on the purpose of antibiotics. I would imagine that most patients that seek medication are unaware of the science behind antibiotics and the microbiome which is why they insist on being prescribed an antibiotic. I think that a good way to get started on slowing down the progressing of this crisis in order to give science the time to find a stop to it would be to educate the public in simple ways. The detailed science behind bacteria and antibiotics is no necessary for informing the public, but teaching basic ideas would be extremely helpful in my opinion. For example, how antibiotics only work on bacterial infections and without testing it is hard to tell if the infection is bacterial or viral, or stressing the importance of not missing a dose of antibiotic. If I had been taught simple things like that earlier, I probably would not have been so quick to ask for medication.

While education is a good method to slow down the crisis, scientists are considering a few new methods to prevent total antibiotic resistance. One method that is currently being used is the combination of antibiotics so lessen the likelihood of the bacteria developing resistance. However, while this may slow resistance down, it is not totally effective in preventing it. One article provides details about how the combination of drugs can select for bacteria with tolerance genes. The study found that these tolerance genes also lead to resistance genes. Through experimentation, results showed that tolerance promotes resistance in a new way. Experiments with different antibiotics and strains of bacteria revealed that this is a general finding and can occur with any type of antibiotic or bacteria. The article concluded that an important factor to consider when combining antibiotics is tolerance.

Another study is researching the possibility of using integrons as a means of finding new scientific discoveries. Integrons allow for the reassortment of genes within a bacterial chromosome. In the past, this has been a possible contributor to antibiotic resistance, but with the use of biotecnology scientists are trying to rearrange the DNA to facilitate new enzyme discovery and possible new biochemical pathways. Because this is an on going study, the use of these new enzymes has not been established yet, but there is a wide range of possibilities with the manipulation of integrons. One of the main tested uses of integrons is that they provide a path for molecular cloning that does not require a vector or antibiotic selection. This occurs through the integrating of natural genes into a cell chromosome that an existing integron acquires. While this article did not detail if this could be used to prevent antibacterial resistance, it does use integrons which were originally the cause of the issue and have found new possibilities to make new scientific discoveries.