Antibiotics are life-saving drugs, but they can also harm the beneficial microbes that live in the human gut. Following antibiotic treatment, some patients are at risk of developing inflammation or opportunistic infections such as Clostridiodes difficile. Indiscriminate use of antibiotics on gut microbes can also contribute to the spread of resistance to the drugs. In […]
Category: Bacteria
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Microbes and minerals may have set off Earth’s oxygenation
For the first 2 billion years of Earth’s history, there was barely any oxygen in the air. While some microbes were photosynthesizing by the latter part of this period, oxygen had not yet accumulated at levels that would impact the global biosphere. But somewhere around 2.3 billion years ago, this stable, low-oxygen equilibrium shifted, and […]
Protein structure offers clues to drug-resistance mechanism
MIT chemists have discovered the structure of a protein that can pump toxic molecules out of bacterial cells. Proteins similar to this one, which is found in E. coli, are believed to help bacteria become resistant to multiple antibiotics. Using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, the researchers were able to determine how the structure of […]