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

Think of all those general methods of killing bacteria as killing humans with a fire/explosion or an earthquake. Something major, all encompassing, nonspecific. Some can survive, but not enough to effectively cause a problem.

Think of antibiotics as something extremely specific like a crazed MMA fighter going attacking people by only doing armbars. For a lot of people, they will break their arms, but for others their arms might be too strong, or maybe the person can counter (has a defense mechanism), OR maybe the person has no arms and the MMA fighter can’t arm bar them.

Now this isn’t how reproduction or genetics works, but just imagine all those left over strong upper body dudes and armless dudes being able to clone themselves or reproduce with each other spreading their strong upper body or armless genes. Now the crazed MMA fighter that only does arm bars can’t really attack anybody.

Antibiotics attack specific functional aspects of bacteria. This could include their actual structure, mechanisms for creating toxins, mechanism of reproduction, mechanism for utilizing their environment, etc etc. This specificity is what makes them helpful, because we can easily kill the bacteria by setting the patient on fire… but then the patient would be dead. edit: but that specificity that allows people to survive, can also allow for some random bacteria here or there to be left over, which can become a problem if they are able to reproduce.