How is an antibiotic effective against bacteria
Researchers from United Kingdom and Australia have created a way of using nanotechnology (nanomedicine) standards to get to know how an antibiotic is effective against bacteria.
Many bacteria (golden staph, for example) are getting resistant to antibiotics, thus becoming an issue for the complete health image of the community.
“It order to attack this problem we need to understand not only the ways in which bacteria develop and exhibit resistance to antibiotics, but also how new antibiotics can work to kill or slow the growth of resistant bacteria,” said Professor Matt Cooper from Australia.
The research was done by creating nano-probes coated with molecules found in bacterial cell walls from normal bacteria and bacteria resistant to antibiotics. Then they added doses of the “last resort” antibiotic, vancomycin, to the system and found that probes from normal bacteria were stressed and changed shape, whereas probes from resistant bacteria were only weakly affected. This way scientists quickly realized the effectiveness of an antibiotic.
“This advance will help us to understand the mode of action of drugs targeted against resistant bacteria, and could also lead to rapid diagnostic tools and novel methods of investigating antibiotic action,” said Cooper. “There is only a tiny molecular difference between resistant and non-resistant bacteria. We now know that these probes can detect that difference, and can do so within minutes.”
The details can be found in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
Source: uq.edu.au
