You swallow a pill and, soon afterwards, there is a ton of dead bacteria inside you. What happens in between?
How does that pill kill the bacteria without severely harming you in the process?
In: Biology
Antibiotics kill bacteria by:
1. Disrupting cell walls (e.g., penicillin).
2. Inhibiting protein production (e.g., tetracyclines).
3. Blocking DNA replication (e.g., ciprofloxacin).
4. Interfering with essential metabolic pathways
These actions prevent bacteria from surviving and multiplying.
So the idea of a poison that is poisonous for something but not poisonous for another thing, is always based on biochemical differences. Life,in general, does the same thing. But if you look into the exact details, different life forms do things very differently.
And bacteria have lots of major differences from a human cell. They have cell wall, that we do not have. They have a fairly different ribosome structure, as well their DNA replication mechanism is also very different.
So basically what happens is that you take a pill, that’s a poison. Just like any poison (or alcohol or anything), it goes from your guts to your blood stream, and it’s present everywhere in your body. This is a poison however that can specifically block one of the bacterial systems (such as cell wall synthesis or ribosomes or whatever), without causing harm to us. It’s utilizing the difference, so it’s only poisonous for that type of ribosome or that type of biochemical processes that the bacteria have and we don’t have.
Now the thing is that while theoretically antibiotics don’t harm us, they can in fact do some harm via different ways. First, they can target our gut bacteria that are our friends so it’s a sad side effect. They sometimes also target mitochondria that are basically ancient bacteria living in our cells and working as power houses. Mitochondria have some common biochemistry with bacteria. And sometimes they target something inside us although they are still more poisonous to bacteria.
Could someone continue with explaining why or how antibiotic resistance is formed after a period of time?
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