Those bacteria that have ways to protect themselves from antibiotics, what are their mechanisms and how do they work?
In: Biology
I can’t explain the precise mechanism (there are many), but I can explain how they occur.
The dna of any organism undergoes changes, due to errors in copying or damage from various sources. Sometimes, those changes result in a new trait (different coloured hair for example). This is called mutation and it’s entirely random.
If you have a colony of bacteria, and one of them mutates in such a way that antibiotics are no longer very good at killing it, that bacterium will be more likely to reproduce, while the rest of them will likely be killed off. The mutation will pass to the offspring, and since all the competing bacteria have been killed, you’re left with the resistant strain only.
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