18. Health care professionals are concerned over the rise in antibiotic resistan

Question

18. Health care professionals are concerned over the rise in antibiotic resistant bacterial strains. Exposure to antibiotics presents a selective environment that favors the evolution of resistance in bacteria. Which lines of evidence suggest that antibiotic resistance evolved a long time ago in bacteria (pre-dating the use of antibiotics by humans)? How and why has antibiotic resistance evolved in bacteria prior to exposure to antibiotic use by humans? What role does exposure to modern antibiotics play in the evolution of antibiotic resistance genes and mechanisms? Based upon the study by Baym et al. 2016, how does the evolution of antibiotic resistance in different bacterial strains inform drug discovery and better design of antibiotics and antimicrobials for human pathogens?

Explanation / Answer

An extraordinary ability for certain bacterial species to develop resistance to drugs as antibiotics. Usually the antibiotics are useful recovering from those deadly germs, but somehow they have found a mechanism to be evolutionary fit also to be induced by the overuse of antibiotics. This does not seems to be the example of evolution in action rather than a variation within a bacterial kind.

As antibiotics are found naturally occurring and they are produced by the microorganisms like bacteria, fungi etc. The natural mechanism or the streamline where it has come through is that the secretion of an bacterium with antibiotics is to kill or suppress the growth of other bacteria or fungi. When Penicillin was found by Alexander Fleming in 1928, it was identified as an antibiotics that inhibits others growth, while there are organisms that can resist it in natural environment. Antibiotic resistance continue to expand due to many reasons later on.

How? and Why? has to be answered by the mechanism which scientists have found in them, those microorganisms while studying them, as they have certain mechanism to built a protection against an antibiotic. One is by mutation, and another one is swapping DNA or known as horizontal gene transfer of genes. If the bacterial cells gets antibiotic attack, the antibiotic binds to a protein for instance so that the protein cannot function properly. This growth hindrances are overcome by the bacterial advance mechanism as antibiotic resistance through altering the protein structure by mutation, so the mutant bacteria survives. A famous example is, during the anthrax scare after the attack in USA in September 11, 2001, ciprofloxacin was given to potential victims. This antibiotics reported to be no useful in some patients as through the mutation the Quinolone (ciprofloxacin is in its group) resistance bacteria have mutations in their gene. So the mutant bacteria survive.

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