Why is bacteria so quickly becoming resistant to antibiotics and yet cooking your food still effectively kills all the bacteria?
In: Biology
There are some things that will kill everything alive, such as enough heat to cook food. The reason it kills everything alive is that these things target something common to all living thngs. In this case, it’s being mostly water and molecules that rapidly lose shape if they are heated above a certain point.
Antibiotics, on the other hand, kill bacteria by stopping some process that bacteria have, but either humans don’t or that isn’t as important to us. For example, penicillin works by stopping bacterial cell wall synthesis. Our cells don’t have cell walls, so this is why we can survive antibiotics, but the bacteria cannot. When bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, they have a mutation that either causes the molecule the antibiotic targeted to be too different a shape to be recognized, or the antibiotic gets spat out of the cell faster than it can seep in, or a variety of other methods. None of the things bacteria have to do to be resistant to antibiotics are fundamentally incompatible with being alive. This is how it’s different from cooking.
Latest Answers