Why can bacteria adapt to antibiotics, but not adapt to environmental things like heat or acids/soaps (Salmonella as an example)?

Question

Edit: I’ve had a lot of fun reading all of your analogies

In: 64

Answer 1

To make an analogy, antibiotics are sort of like a special key that fits into your car’s lock and allows thieves to steal your car. If we duplicate your car 10,000 times while randomly making minor changes to it, chances are that some of those cars will have minor changes to their locks such that the thieves’ key no longer fits and they can’t steal that car. This is like how bacteria can mutate antibiotic resistance.

But heat is more like an anti-tank round. It doesn’t matter what minor changes you made to your car, the anti-tank round is going to destroy it anyway. In fact it would be a real challenge to modify your car to survive it even if you did it intentionally! Heat is going to denature the proteins used to construct the bacteria no matter how they are arranged.