Common Superbug Develops Drug Reaction to Last-Resort Antibiotic

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drug reaction

Drug Reaction: When humans made first antibiotic, it looked as if they conquered the world.

But as soon as the number of antibiotics kept evolving, most pathogens started developing a sort of immunity towards them. And this is termed as drug reaction.

In order to nullify bacterial infection, a variety of antibiotics are used. They not only control the growth of bacteria (pathogen) but also kill them.

But due to the rising incidences of antibiotic infections (as seen worldwide), it has given rise to over a million deaths annually.

In order to throw some light in the cases of drug resistance cases, a team of researchers conducted their experiments.

A team of researchers from the university of Oxford started studying the entire process that tend to drive the fall and rise of resistance in some of the common pathogens.

It became the key to handling the steep rise in the antimicrobial resistance (AMR) cases.

Professor Craig MacLean, who’s leading the research team said that a gene is responsible towards evolving resistance to a last resort antibiotic.

This gene was found to mutate at a higher rate making bacteria to induce resistance to the antibiotic within a short period of time.

This is what the professor said, ‘Our research suggests that, for this particular case, selective pressures generated by this gene’s association with the immune system may have driven the evolution of extra-fast mutation rate, that be quickly evolving to make bacteria resistant to antibiotics.’ he said.

Most common bacteria known to cause lung infections is Pseudomonas. In order to find the gene responsible for drug resistance among them, researchers cultured over 850 populations of Pseudomonas and tested them with Colistin solution.

After sequencing their genome, scientists were able to find how quickly they developed resistance against antibiotic.

The final results showed how quickly these varieties of Pseudomonas developed drug reaction to the last-resort antibiotic.

During the research, scientists also noted one positive sign. It was when the bacteria started developing resistance to Colistin. They found when the antibiotic was slowly withdrawn, the population of pathogen lost their resistance quickly at a high mutation rate.

 

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