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?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
Maybe I am misunderstanding her research, but it seems these would stall various sorts of infections while more traditional antibiotics would clear the infection of a patient. I don't think we would see use of these "blockers" used to simply maintain health outside of healthcare facilities.
That how I read it at least.
So then I would imagine they would have limited use if their only purpose is to stall infections before antibiotic intervention...
Yes, but that really is true for a lot of medicines. My understanding of bacteria that are already resistant to certain types of antibiotics (sulfa groups etc) is that over-prescribing and not following proper schedules with antibiotics has given rise to various resistant strains due to increasing the likelihood of bacteria evolving various enzymes to inhibit or cease the mechanism of action these drugs have.
I do feel the need to stress that I may have misinterpreted how Bonnie thinks these drugs will be utilized in the field.
HAM...just saw you post on p.semi, would you like to find p. azurescens in Oregon?
I read your posts in my head with your voice..
I believe the idea is that quorum sensing inhibitors would function similarly to bacteriostatic antimicrobials. The inhibitors would halt communication and cooperation until the immune system can eliminate the infection.
*something to do with windows and macintosh viruses*
Post a Comment