Antibiotic Multi-resistance: Why Bacteria Are So Effective

In an article published in Science, teams from the Institut Pasteurand the University of Limoges, associated with the CNRS and Inserm, decipher for the first time the molecular mechanism that enables bacteria to acquire multi-resistance to antibiotics, and that even allows them to adapt this resistance to their environment.

This discovery highlights the difficulties that will have to be tackled by public health strategies if they are to address the problems created by multi-resistance.

The work of researchers reveals for the first time today how bacteria acquire these multi -resistance properties. It is actually the antibiotics themselves that trigger the synthesis of the bacterial enzyme that captures the resistance genes and enables their expression in the integron.

Source cnrs