Waiting it Out

Bacteria scheming their way past antibiotic treatments know that there’s often more than one way around a challenge. As well as antibiotic resistance – the increasing problem of bacteria adapting to repel antibiotics – some bacteria develop subgroups that simply wait out the antibiotic presence, persisting until the path is clear to expand again. Staphylococcus aureus causes a range of serious diseases, and can often withstand antibiotic treatment (pictured, with dead bacteria in red and surviving bacteria in green after treatment in a mouse). A new study has shown that the acidic environment created when cells are under stress combined with antibiotic exposure leads to a sub-population of the bacteria undergoing molecular changes and becoming dormant, hibernating until it’s safe to reactivate. The researchers then trialled a treatment targeting this sleeping beast, potentially pointing the way for new approaches to prevent persistent infections for good.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Markus Huemer and Srikanth Mairpady Shambat, and colleagues
• Department of Infectious Diseases and Hospital Epidemiology, University Hospital Zurich, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
• Image copyright held by original authors; image reproduction permitted by PNAS
• Research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), February 2021