New research from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis suggests it may be possible to rein in the spread of "superbug" infections without having to develop new antibiotics.
A team of researchers studied samples of Acinetobacter baumannii that were isolated from a 2012 outbreak at a Canadian hospital that infected four patients and killed one.
Highlighted below are three things to know about the study on A. baumannii and the findings.
1. The researchers expected the A. baumannii bacteria to readily kill other bacteria by producing and injecting a poison into their bacterial competitors.
2. Instead, the scientists found that the bacteria's poison injection system was disabled in most of the samples studied from the Canadian outbreak. They identified chunks of bacterial DNA — known as plasmids — that shut down the system and carried genes that enabled the bacteria to resist antibiotics.
3. They also found that part of the bacterial population regularly deactivated the plasmids, which turned on the poison injection system and transformed the bacteria into killers, but doing so meant the bacteria also turned off the antibiotic-resistance genes, making the bacteria vulnerable to antibiotics.
"This appears to be a common strategy for these bacteria in different parts of the world, and further study could help us understand how bacteria evolve into superbugs that are resistant to many forms of treatment," said senior author Mario Feldman, PhD, associate professor of molecular microbiology. "This knowledge could lead to more effective treatments and better strategies for preventing the development of superbugs."
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