Video Shows How Bacteria Invade Antibiotics And Transform Into Superbugs (npr.org) 87
guises writes: By making a giant petri dish out of bands of increasingly antibiotic-laced agar, a couple of microbiologists have created a means to watch bacterial evolution as it happens: colonies introduced to the dish expand to fill the areas in which they can survive and then mutate and spread into the areas in which they can not. It takes only eleven days for the bacteria to evolve sufficient resistance to survive in an area with a thousand times the concentration of antibiotics that would have killed the original colonies. And it makes a pretty neat video.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, but how many of them survived the incinerator? Or just pour some bleach into the dish.
It wasn't wasted. They just created a new condiment for Chipotle restaurants.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That depends on how slowly they were fed into the incinerator or how slowly the concentration of bleach was raised.
Re:What a waste! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
This is incredibly wasteful. We know that bacteria are developing antibiotic resistance and that it's a big problem. Why would you help bacteria develop more antibiotic resistance, especially for a video? This is an asinine waste of antibiotics and contributes to the danger of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
OK, maybe you saw the original snarky submission title "Submission: Scientists create invincible super bacteria in order to make a cool video":
I'm sure the actual presentation title is a bit more realistic.. "WATCH: Bacteria Invade Antibiotics And Transform Into Superbugs". And it wasn't wasted. The article comes out with some surprising conclusions, such as, it being discovered that previously impossible studying of bacterial progress was now possible with the 4 foot petri dish, and the even more surprisin
Re: (Score:1)
the faster growing non-resistant bacteria choke off the superbugs, which is very useful knowledge..
Sorry for my bad English, but I don't understand what you meant by this?
Re: (Score:1)
You use your computer because of Boole and Babbage, both avowed Christians.
Re: Heathens! Pagans! This is the devil's work! (Score:1)
And some priest ended up with a kernel of corn on his knob after documenting Richard Dawkins' Petri dish
Re: (Score:2)
We remember these people for what they contributed to mankind, not for their superstitions.
Newton was into alchemy (and religion). I'd say he has wasted the rest of his life with it. But hey, it was his life so he got to spend it like he wanted it. I didn't have any right that he'd spend it the way I would have liked it anyway. But still, what a waste.
Bert
Re: (Score:2)
Smart people are very good at rationalizing things they came to believe for not-very-smart reasons. That's why you gotta get the parents to brainwash the kids before they develop their critical thinking skills.
Re: (Score:2)
And how did they know this, eh? Oh, wait! Sure, there was this really old collection of legends and myths, and they could see it was obviously true, because it correlated so very well with experience.
Boole's own algebra, axiomatically derived by Richard Cox and converted into a sound basis for epistemology by a number of people especially E. T. Jaynes, can be used to show that their views, unsupported by anything like reliable evidence, were extremely unlikely to be true given the evidence.
But hey, these
Re:Heathens! Pagans! This is the devil's work! (Score:4, Interesting)
Too bad a bunch of other avowed Christians were likely responsible for cutting Turing's life in half. Also, I'll give you Babbage, but Boole was leaning hard towards deist.
Re: (Score:3)
I can't tell as you write the exact same things they do.
Re: (Score:3)
Poe's Law in all it's glory.
Re:Misleading headline (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is exactly what you want when you're investigating / demonstrating a single process.
Re: (Score:2)
Right... because in the wild bacteria acquire antibiotic resistance through ingesting magic fairy dust?
This sort of experiment does tend to accelerate things dramatically by removing most other evolutionary pressures, but doesn't fundamentally change either the outcome or the mechanisms at work. A hospital presents much the same environment - graduated regions of ambient antibiotics and lots of food. The biggest difference is that there's lots of other species of microbe they're competing with. And when s
Re: (Score:2)
But results can't be inferred to be the same as outside, which is why it is the headline that is misleading.
It shows how bacteria can quickly become superbugs in the right environment. Even in a less than ideal environment, it only has to evolve once to jump to the next person and unlike in this experiment, they are generally going to be surrounded by lots of environments(people) with no antibiotics in their system.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Title is incorrect (Score:4, Insightful)
Bacteria do not evade antibiotics, they die and quite simply those that are not affected by the particular anti-biotic survive and reproduce. As the bacteria are relatively simple and they DNA is also relatively simply, they can only be resistant to a limited number of potential antibiotics, so new anti-biotics mixes can simply be many older ones mixed together, don't kill the bacteria with one, kill it with the other, they could also add in immune system supplements to power up the immune system in conjunction with the anti-biotic mix. As the anti-biotic mix could be quite a large dose, it would be better that side affects do not compound but impact the body in different ways, so many smaller side affects rather than compounding side affects.
Re: (Score:1)
True to some extent, sadly there aren’t that many classes of antibiotics kown. Resistance to a single class is developed relatively easily, and can work against tens of brands of antibiotics.
Re: (Score:2)
A symposium on new vaccine techniques, interesting in light of TFA (could be adapted to work against some bacteria as well as viruses):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Starts in a ways, IIRC at about 12 minutes.
Re: (Score:3)
Title is Correct (Score:2)
Just read the article and watched the video. The video has areas that have no antibiotics that's where the bacteria start. Further in areas have higher concentrations of antibiotics. The bacteria colonizes into the antibacteria areas they are literally invading the antibiotic material / area.
Re:Title is Correct (Score:5, Informative)
Oh well, it bothers me more that they changed "couldn't" to "can not." Let it be known: I got the tense right.
Re: (Score:2)
colonies introduced to the dish expand to fill the areas in which they can survive and then mutate and spread into the areas in which they can not
You mixed present and past tense. To be consistent:
"... expand to fill the areas in which they can survive and then mutate and spread into the areas in which they can not survive without the mutation"
"... expanded to fill the areas in which they could survive and then mutated and spread into the areas in which they could not prior to the mutation."
Re: (Score:2)
Bacteria "evade" and not "invade" antibiotics.
They did indeed invade the part of the petri dish that was laced with antibiotics. After developing resistance there was no need for them to evade it.
DNA analysis? (Score:4, Interesting)
has anyone compared the DNA of the final generations to determine if they are genetically identical or radically different?
Re:DNA analysis? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Yes they did. It's in the Science paper at http://science.sciencemag.org/... [sciencemag.org] (Sci-hub at http://science.sciencemag.org.... [sci-hub.cc]) They sequenced several hundred of the mutant strains, plus, of course, multiple isolates of the wild-type strains (as wild types drift, even without deliberately applied evolutionary pressures).
To no-one's surprise, when they sequenced up to a dozen isolates in a l
Now this is cool! (Score:5, Informative)
Now you know why your doctor says take all the pills in the prescription. You want to be at 1000, not 1.
Re: (Score:2)
Would also be curious to see a video where the first stripe was 10 or 1000. If they're not allowed to develop resistance gradually how long does it take?
Re: (Score:1)
Either the colony will evolve the mutation allowing it to spread or it will exhaust the nutrients provided in the agar and die.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Post plastic world, post antbiotic world (Score:1)
Notice the insanely fast way evolution can occur when given the opportunity? See all that plastic you have? It's full of energy, if you burn it it makes a lot of heat. It's not a lot more complicated than cellulose to digest.
So bacteria will evolve to eat it and already are:
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-bacteria-eat-plastic-20160310-story.html
So we had antibiotics for 100 years, and plastics for about the same.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, hospitals are full of strains of resistant bacteria that only exist in hospitals. Understand: studies have shown that the same strains exist in hospitals all over the country. They don't come pouring out, though. There are also resistant strains "in the wild" (outside the relatively controlled hospital environments) but they are not the same as the ones in the hospitals.
Video (Score:1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
I don't understand how this can be evolution.
Not sure if that's "don't understand" or "don't want to understand", but I'll assume the first and try to explain as well as I can.
To me, production of a drug resistant bacteria is analogous to having a child with stronger muscles that can beat the stronger wood at each section.
Let's go for the 'stronger muscles', and put some specific evolutional pressure on that. You're right that there is a natural variation in how strong people are. In one generation, picking the stronger people isn't evolution, yet. But let's scale up this petri dish thing to human scale. Let's take an uninhabited Earth-like planet, with several empty islands, all habitable, and a
Re: (Score:2)
on a positive note (Score:5, Funny)
it's a good thing that nobody's dumb enough to routinely dose cattle and chicken and other livestock with anti-biotics. that would enable resistant bugs to evolve and spread everywhere.
Re: (Score:2)
Now they must ask... (Score:2)
Mutations? What mutations? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Wrong. First of all, recessive genes only happen when you have sexual reproduction, where two sets of genes combine, not in bacteria, where the gene is either there when the bacteria splits into two almost-identical bacteria, or not.
Second, if some of the bacteria originally possessed the genes which enabled it to survive 1000x concentration of the antibiotic, you would see a streak as that bacterial strain immediately spread into all the bands. The pauses at each concentration boundary show that no strain
Re: (Score:2)
The "landscape" of different concentrations of antibiotics in the MEGA-dish provides the test of thickness. The bacteria don't (on the timescale involved) diffusively move by more than a few millimetres on this metre-scale Petri dish. So the spread of colonies by tens of millimetres to tens of centimetres is accomplished by mummy (or daddy) bacteria loving other bacteria very much ... oh, sorry, no - completely ignoring each other ... and
Technique adaptable to another endevor? (Score:1)
OK, I can see how this could be used to create strains of bacteria resistant to a large number of antibiotics. Don't see that as a practical activity for most people.
As I have no current plans to become a bio-terrorist, this technique isn't terribly useful to me in its current form.
Could it be adapted somehow, perhaps to turn federal judges and/or bureaucrats and other such life-forms into productive members of society?
If I come up with something, I'll post it here. K?
[mutters] Take a really big petri