A Side-Effect Of Antibiotics May Not Be A Side-effect At All, It May Be A Feature
Just about everyone in the developed world has taken an antibiotic to treat a bacterial infection and the instructions are well-known; don't stop after you start to feel better, even though you know they are killing machines.Yet the picture may be more complex, according to a new paper, and it might change our understanding of why bacteria produce antibiotics in the first place. "For a long time we've thought that bacteria make antibiotics for the same reasons that we love them - because they kill other bacteria," said Elizabeth Shank, an assistant professor of biology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "However, we've also known that antibiotics can sometimes have pesky side-effects, like stimulating biofilm formation." read more