what is an antibiotic and how does it’s work?
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Antibiotics are medicines that fight infections caused by bacteria in humans and animals by either killing the bacteria or making it difficult for the bacteria to grow and multiply.
An antibiotic is a substance which are toxic to bacteria but not so toxic to humans or other animals. Bacteria cells is very different from cells of larger organisms so there are a lot of these substances which are toxic to bacteria.
Antibiotics are basically drugs effective on killing bacteria. It goes into your bloodstream as a molecule aiming for particular organ or infecting bacteria. And it works only for Bacterial infection, which isn’t so bad unless it reaches brain or some important organ.
Antibiotics are medicines that help stop infections caused by bacteria. They do this by killing the bacteria or by keeping them from copying themselves or reproducing.
So this doesn’t really have an ELI5 answer because there are multiple different types of antibiotics that use different mechanisms of attack.
In general an antibiotic is just a chemical substance that can harm or inhibit bacteria. The mechanism can range from just slowing the growth of the bacteria, to introducing toxic substances to the bacteria, to penetrating the cell wall causing the bacteria to lyse and dien
Antibiotics are classes of chemicals which do something to interrupt the life cycle of bacteria, but nothing to animal cells. As a result of this, if you flood your system with them, the bacteria all die and your own cells don’t notice.
Most antibiotics are derived from chemicals produced by other organisms. Penicillin is named after the *penicillium* mold in which it was first isolated. It was noticed that this mold formed a clear ring around itself on a petri dish otherwise completely covered in bacteria because it was emitting this chemical to drive off competition. Most other antibiotics have similar origin stories.
Antibiotics aren’t perfect, though. They work more like throwing a wrench into a specific part of a delicate machine than a hammer smashing that machine to bits. Penicillin, for instance, only weakens the cell walls of certain, specific bacteria by inhibiting a specific chemical reaction. When this works, it causes the weakened cells to explode. But if something random happens to the bacterium which changes how that reaction can occur, the bacterium will no longer be susceptible to this attack. That’s how we get antibiotic resistance.
The “good” thing about resistance genes is that they are mostly terrible for the bacteria in a vacuum. The penicillin resistance gene straight-up weakens the cell wall on its own, just not enough to kill the cell, and in a way which penicillin won’t make worse. If you stopped using penicillin entirely, the bacteria which didn’t have this gene would outcompete the ones which do, and the same goes for most other antibiotic resistance genes as well. But doing this would take massive organization on the part of every doctor in the world to keep using the antibiotics we have in a ~10 year cycle to prevent any bacterium from catching up again, and also banning the use of antibiotics in animals. Which isn’t happening unless a lot of things change really fast.
Antibiotics are substances that fight against bacteria in your body. There are millions and millions bacteria in a human body. Many of them are useful e.g. for digestion, but some can be undesirable, taking advantage of your body, making you sick.
Now antibiotics fight ALL bacteria, regardless of their origin and purpose. If you are sick due to bacterial infection and there is no way (or time) to find out which bacteria makes you sick doctors often use broad-spectrum antibiotic to kill ALL bacteria, also the useful ones, in order to abolish the infection in your body in the first step.
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