Building a Better Weapon against Bacteria
Building a Better Weapon against Bacteria – Antibiotics are compounds that can kill bacteria.
Many antibiotics are produced naturally by bacteria themselves as they compete for food or living space with other bacterial species. Over time, bacteria that are always exposed to antibiotics will be under selective pressure to evolve resistance to them; the members of the population that are more resistant will be the ones to reproduce more often.
What everyone needs is not a bunch of newer, stronger antibiotics. People need smarter antibiotics, ones able to target only pathogenic bacteria while leaving non-pathogens alone, and ones which bacterial pathogens can’t easily develop resistance to. For a long time, this goal seemed impossible, until the discovery of CRISPR-Cas systems in bacteria.
Bacteria are constantly exposed to viruses called phage which inject their own genes into bacterial cells and hoping to produce more phage. To protect against phage, bacteria use a unique defence system involving CRISPRs (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats in RNA), and CRISPR-associated proteins, which neutralize invading phage. Scientists say these CRISPRs could be used to protect against pathogens.
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