Researchers in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School have just opened a new window into understanding the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria.
- By STEPHANIE DUTCHEN
The work not only reveals principles of evolutionary biology but also suggests a new strategy to combat the antibiotic resistance crisis, which kills an estimated 1.3 million people per year worldwide.
Findings, supported in part by federal funding, are published Nov. 20 in Science.
Members of the labs of Michael Baym, associate professor of biomedical informatics, and Johan Paulsson, professor of systems biology, devised a way to track the evolution and spread of antibiotic resistance in individual bacteria by measuring competition among plasmids.
Plasmids are self-replicating genetic elements that float separately from a bacterium's own chromosomes. Plasmids evolve independently but also help drive bacterial evolution, including the development of resistance to antimicrobial compounds. In fact, they are the primary way that resistance can jump from one type of bacteria to another.
Scientists have suspected that competition among plasmids within bacterial cells is key to propelling plasmid evolution, but until now they hadn't found a way to study it. First author Fernando Rossine, research fellow in biomedical informatics in the Baym Lab, and colleagues did so by solving two challenges.
