Iron-clad Resistance

Drug resistant ‘superbugs’ are a fast-growing threat to global health due to the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, and urgent action is needed to tackle the problem. Discovering new antibiotics is one solution, but bacteria will still develop resistance in a relatively short time. As an alternative strategy, researchers are trying to understand how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics in the first place. These test tubes contain cultures of Pseudomonas aeruginosa – notorious superbugs that infect open wounds and can cause severe lung infections in people with cystic fibrosis – grown in increasing concentrations of the antibiotic kanamycin (left to right). Intriguingly, the bacteria produce increasing amounts of a green iron-rich pigment called pyocyanin as antibiotic levels rise, which seems to help them become resistant to the drug. Developing drugs that interfere with pyocyanin production could therefore be a good way to prevent Pseudomonas from developing resistance to many commonly used antibiotics.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

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Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image from work by Kui Zhu and colleagues
• Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Biology, December 2019