How do antibiotics kill bacterial cells but not human cells? by Harry Mobley
Most bacteria produce a cell wall that is composed partly of a macromolecule called peptidoglycan, itself made up of amino sugars and short peptides. Human cells do not make or need peptidoglycan. Penicillin, one of the first antibiotics to be used widely, prevents the final cross-linking step, or transpeptidation, in assembly of this macromolecule. The result is a very fragile cell wall that bursts, killing the bacterium.
Read more blog posts on antibiotics and on health care.
August 17th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
This is another sign of the increasing health threat posed by drug resistant bacteria. The problem of drug resistant bacteria is made much worse by the improper use of anti-biotics…
October 19th, 2006 at 7:19 pm
The US Center for Disease Control has again urged hospitals to increase efforts to reduce drug-resistant infections. In 1972, only 2 percent of these types of bacteria were drug resistant. By 2004, 63 percent of these types of bacteria had become resistant to the antibiotics commonly used to treat them…
May 25th, 2007 at 11:45 am
[...] How do antibiotics kill bacteria? - Drug Resistant Bacteria More Common - Statistics for Experimenters by curiouscat [...]
June 3rd, 2007 at 12:50 pm
[...] The risks are well known, given the extreme mobility in the world today, for TB, and other communicable diseases, becoming more troublesome, costly and deadly - often due to improper antibiotic use. But we continue to avoid giving this risk near the level of attention it seems to deserve. [...]
November 25th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
The part of the atmosphere that changes the Sun’s light is the molecules and tiny particles that are floating in it…
February 23rd, 2008 at 8:54 pm
“Bacteria evolve quickly; some have already acquired resistance to all clinically relevant antibiotics,” says Filutowicz, professor of bacteriology in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. “We microbiologists have to respond with new ideas and new technologies to outsmart the evolving bugs.”