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Fussy eaters: the favoured food of Salmonella

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As antibiotic resistance increases the search for new anti-bacterial treatments becomes more and more important. One way to design anti-bacterials is to find specific biochemical pathways that the bacteria require to survive, and develop drugs that block off these pathways. Some pathways are better targets than others and for  Salmonella bacteria it was thought that pathways dealing with nutrient metabolises would be a lost cause. Salmonella lives in the intestine, which hosts a whole variety of different nutrients, so surely preventing the bacteria from using a specific one wouldn’t cause them much undue distress. It’s been found, however, that as they grow and spread in the inflamed intestine the bacteria are heavily reliant on one particular nutrient: fructose-asparagine. The chemical structure of fructose-asparagine, image from the reference. The importance of fructose-asparagine metabolism was originally discovered durin...
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Timing is key for bacteria surviving antibiotics

For bacteria facing a dose of antibiotics, timing might be the key to evading destruction. In a series of experiments, Princeton researchers found that cells that repaired DNA damaged by antibiotics before resuming growth had a much better chance of surviving treatment. When antibiotics hit a population of bacteria, often a small fraction of "persister" cells survive to pose a threat of recurrent infection. Unlike bacteria with genetic resistance to antibiotics, evidence suggests that persisters stay alive in part by stalling cellular processes targeted by the drugs. In a new study, Princeton researchers examined a class of antibiotics that target bacterial DNA. In bacterial populations, some cells repair damaged DNA before resuming growth, and others resume growth before making repairs. The researchers found that those that make repairs before resuming growth generally are the ones that survive as persisters. The research advances a long-term goal to make ...
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