Tuesday, May 1, 2012

UNANSWERED QUESTION

Bonnie Bassler talks about how drugs that inhibit bacterial quorum sensing could be novel treatments for antibiotic resistant infections but from what I can tell the drugs she describes would not inhibit (or might even induce) mitosis. It seems people taking these inhibitors would harbor high concentrations of pathogenic bacteria while not suffering from their presence i.e. become asymptomatic carriers who would spread the disease to others forcing enormous numbers of people to also take quorum sensing inhibitors to survive, has this been identified as a possible risk or am I confused?