Short article
Researchers at Princeton and California State University-Northridge (CSUN) have shed light on a novel way bacteria have evolved another strategy in the resistance of antibiotics as shown in the images. In a population of E. coli bacteria treated with a particular antimicrobial molecule (labeled in green), some dying cells absorb large amounts of the antibiotic, allowing their neighbors to survive and continue growing. This figure shows a time-lapse of bacterial growth over four hours.
Andrej Košmrlj, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton, collaborated with the CSUN team to develop a mathematical model to more fully explain the phenomenon and aid further investigations.
The model describes the dynamics of bacterial populations facing different concentrations of the antimicrobial, showing how dead cells sequester the dangerous molecule and predicting the delayed growth of surviving cells—calculations borne out by experiments in the laboratory of Sattar Taheri-Araghi, an assistant professor of physics at CSUN and co-senior author of the study along with Košmrlj.
Link to research; https://elifesciences.org/articles/38174
Article sourced Phys.org
Image Credit: Beatrice Trinidad