Antibiotics May Become Harder to Resist essays

Antibiotics May Become Harder to Resist essays Antibiotics may become harder to resist Antibiotics may become harder to resist because bacteria are finding ways to get around the drug. Antibiotics are also getting weaker, but scientists are working as hard as they can to prevent this from happening. Scientists are trying to design types of drugs that can keep working, even though these antibiotics are being used by many people, scientists are performing many long experiments to develop these drugs. An example of one of these experiments is trying to stop the growth of antibiotic pollution. In this experiment, scientists discovered that a person who takes an antibacterial drug, excretes much of the does intact. This contaminated rivers or soil and kills many of the microbes it encounters but it leaves behind those that can resist it. After a period of time, these bacteria can transmit the resistance-conferring genetic makeup to both their progeny and the bacteria that are nearby. To stop this from happening, scientists are creating antibiotics that self-destruct. They conducted an experiment to prove this is possible by attaching a light-sensitive component to a cephalosporin antibiotic which represents important characteristics of this class of drugs. In a few hours of exposure to the suns ultraviolent (UV) rays, the light-sensitive component falls off. What remains is unstable and quickly breaks apart into pieces with no antibiotic activity. In a second series of experiments, they used a phosphate-attaching enzyme as their tool for resisting drugs that gain no survival advantage against this drug. This shoves phosphate off the bacterial cell so it can kill it. Richard Novick of the New York University Medical center thinks that both strategies to attacking this problem are extremely clever. He also added that bacteria are extremely clever and will eventually find alternate routes of resistance. This means that ...