Follow the Drugs

In order for antibiotic drugs to be effective at treating bacterial infections, they need to get to where the bugs are. The lung disease tuberculosis (TB), caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria, is particularly stubborn, often taking at least six months of treatment with three different antibiotics to get rid of it. To find out why, researchers have developed a new technique known as CLEIMiT, which uses three different types of microscopy to reveal exactly where drugs have gone inside tissues and even individual cells. These images are different coloured versions of the lungs of a mouse infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis that has been treated with an antibiotic called bedaquiline. Although the drug appears to successfully get into some infected cells, it doesn’t reach them all. The findings are a vital insight into how antibiotics are working in the body and help to explain why TB is so difficult to treat.

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 by Antony Fearns and Angela Rodgers, cover PLOS Biology, January 2021
• Host–Pathogen Interactions in Tuberculosis Laboratory, The Francis Crick Institute, London, UK
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Biology, December 2020