Without effective antibiotics, much of modern medicine would not be possible. The treatment of cancer, the care of premature babies and even the most common surgical procedures would not be possible. Yet as each day passes, we move closer to a post-antibiotic era. The severity of the problem, which has rendered many of the strongest [...]

Today is January 28, and Lenina has a smashing headache; she is a Streptococcus pneumoniae researcher. Not that this was the main reason for the headache, but an important meeting was being held today to launch the Pneumococcal Molecular Epidemiology Network’s [PMEN] new paper in Science. Oddly enough, her role at the meeting is to [...]

December turned out to be a rather hectic month for several reasons, so I decided to take a break from blogging. Now the holidays are over, I will back to regular blogging for 2013! In a previous post I wrote about how two-component systems evolved in bacteria while dying out in animals, so for this [...]

A lot of the research that gets highlighted on this blog is academic, providing fascinating insights into bacterial behaviour and potential antibiotic targets. I was excited, therefore, to have the opportunity to highlight some industrial research, looking at developing new antibiotic compounds against a broad-spectrum range of bacteria. In particular this research concentrates on potential [...]

I’m currently off on my seriously-delayed honeymoon, so over the next two weeks I’ll be sticking up some posts I enjoyed from my old blog. They’ve been modified and re-edited to include new information (and images!) where appropriate, but unfortunately I won’t be able to answer comments or participate in any discussion about them until [...]

I’ve been getting so exited about the awesome powers of bacteria on this blog lately that I’ve been neglecting to cover the nasty bacteria. More specifically the fascinating world of antibiotics, the antimicrobial elements that bacteria and fungi produce and that humans exploit, manufacture and synthesise in order to protect against bacterial infections. Luckily a [...]

There are some beautiful new pictures on the New Scientist website of the top ten superbug supervillains. Each superbug has a mugshot along with a quick description of why it’s so dangerous. Most of the bacterial names have “drug resistant” or “antibiotic resistant” now incorporated in front of the name. This is because drug resistance [...]

Antibiotic resistance is often seen as a modern phenomenon – an ability generated by bacteria in order to defend against the challenges of modern medicine. This is supported by the fact that bacteria from before the era of antibiotics are often more susceptible to their use. Which is why I found it intriguing that recent studies (ref [...]

Ever since the discovery and marketing of penicillin in 1928 by Alexander Fleming, bacteria have been developing resistance to antibiotics at an alarming rate. In many cases, resistant bacteria can be found lurking even before the new drug hits the market, making it only a matter of time before it becomes widespread. Bacteria that are [...]

Antibiotics are strange little molecules. In low-to-medium concentrations they are used by bacteria to protect their territory and (possibly) to signal to neighbouring bacteria. At higher concentrations they can be used to kill the bacteria that injure us, but at concentrations too high they can also cause serious damage to our own internal bacteria and [...]

No one wants a hacking cough for days or weeks on end. But research shows that it generally takes about 18 days to get over a standard cough-based illness. Most of us grow impatient after a week or so and head to the doctor to get a prescription. The problem with that recourse, however, is [...]

The most commonly acquired sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the U.S., chlamydia and gonorrhea, are usually cleared out swiftly and easily with a dose of oral antibiotics. But one of these infections is growing bold and finding ways to evade treatment. More than 321,000 cases of gonorrhea are reported each year in the U.S. alone—and [...]

Some strains of nasty bacterial infections, such as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), come loaded with resistance to antibiotics built right into their genes. But certain infections seem to acquire an ability to persist in the face of drugs that should knock them out—without developing the genetic hallmarks of antibiotic resistance. For decades, researchers have thought [...]

When I was growing up in the 1980s and ’90s with two younger brothers, the antibiotic amoxicillin was a frequent guest in our house. Strep throat, sinus infections, sore throats, coughs; we all remember that thick, pink, bubble gum-flavored liquid perhaps a little too well. But this popular drug, like many antibiotics, is overprescribed—often given [...]

We now have responses to the Top Science Questions facing the US from Governor Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama. So I thought I’d look at some of the specifics in their answers to the next question in our weekly list–number 7, on agriculture and food safety. (For this election-year project, Scientific American partnered with [...]

Tetracycline—a powerful antibiotic—came from the soil. Researchers isolated the drug, used to treat everything from sexually transmitted diseases to bacterial pneumonia, from the soil-dwelling microbe Septomyces aureofaciens, which produces tetracycline to kill its microbe neighbors. So it comes as no surprise that other soil microbes have evolved ways to resist this antibiotic But a new [...]

Our pill-popping culture and over-zealous livestock farmers typically take the blame for the widespread resistance of many harmful strains of bacteria to entire classes of antibiotics. And the Food and Drug Administration took a bold move today with a new voluntary plan to help curtail the over-use of antibiotics in agriculture. But the capacity to [...]

For something thought to be largely extraneous, the appendix can be a real pain. Hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. have appendectomies each year, often for an appendix that is swollen rather than ruptured. But a new study suggests that many of those surgeries might often be as unnecessary as the organ they’re [...]

The arms race between humanity and disease-causing bacteria is drawing to a close—and the bacteria are winning. The latest evidence: gonorrhea is becoming resistant to all standard antibiotic treatment. Gonorrhea is one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases in the world—with about 600,000 cases diagnosed in the U.S. each year. A few years ago, [...]

Bacteria easily elude human detection—even those that can make us sick—quietly spreading from person to person, country to country. A recent global spike in bugs that are resistant to common antibiotics, however, has caused many scientists and policymakers to pay closer attention to when and where these infections are occurring. A new collection of updated [...]

Next time you see a scientist in the street, grab him or her and ask who they view as the enemy. Quite likely they’ll give you a weird look, and perhaps they’ll run away, but if they don’t, I’d bet they’d say journalists. Many scientists I know brace themselves for speaking with journalists about their [...]