how bacteria can natural select to become resistant to antibiotics in decades but not resistant to heat (cooking), ethanol (fermentation), and/or salt after tens of thousands of years of contact w these pressures.

Question

Why is cooking still an effective way of eliminating human pathogens or fermentation or salting? These methods do not eliminate all traces of the bacteria so what is keeping a random mutation from happening that allows, say, e. Coli in beef to become resistant to heat up to 60c or Listeria to resist salt concentrations to the same levels as bacteria which are not infectious and potential beneficial to us that can tolerate?

What is it about antibiotics that makes them so susceptible to creating these random mutations that antibiotics become near obsolete in decades?

In: 24

Answer 1

Most antibiotics don’t kill the organism directly; they interfere with reproduction by tampering with DNA or the process of mitosis. All it takes is one mutation that overcomes that interference, and you have a new version of the organism that is resistant to the antibiotic.

Cooking, fermentation, salting directly kill the organisms.