How antibiotics spread resistance
Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - 08:40
in Health & Medicine
Bacteria can become insensitive to antibiotics by picking up resistance genes from the environment. Unfortunately for patients, the stress response induced by antibiotics activates competence in microorganisms, the ability to take up and integrate foreign DNA. Microbiologists from the University of Groningen (UG) and the University of Lausanne have now described a new mechanism by which Streptococcus pneumoniae can become competent, and why biofilms may be important in this process. Their results were published in Cell Reports on November 27.