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?
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It’s easier to evolve defenses to antibiotics than the other factors. So even though there has been more time either the steps needed to mutate are much much more difficult and haven’t happened yet OR there is just not way to evolve around the problem.
Antibiotics interrupt various processes in the cells, like a tree falling on a train track blocking a particular train route. Antibiotic resistance is like using an alternate route so the tree isn’t an issue anymore.
Heat affects the proteins that are part of the cells more directly. It doesn’t block a process from happening, it causes the proteins that do the process to fall apart. To go back to our train example it’s like the power going out completely. Now it’s not just one route that’s not working, the whole system can’t function. It’s a lot harder to adapt to that. Some proteins are more resistant to heat than others so in theory if they can do the same job it might be possible to develop resistance, but there are still limits on how much heat proteins can handle due to basic physics and chemistry.
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