{"id":194310,"date":"2024-08-09T20:23:04","date_gmt":"2024-08-10T01:23:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/08\/scientists-have-found-a-secret-switch-that-lets-bacteria-resist-antibiotics-and-its-been-evading-lab-tests-for-decades"},"modified":"2024-08-09T20:23:04","modified_gmt":"2024-08-10T01:23:04","slug":"scientists-have-found-a-secret-switch-that-lets-bacteria-resist-antibiotics-and-its-been-evading-lab-tests-for-decades","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/08\/scientists-have-found-a-secret-switch-that-lets-bacteria-resist-antibiotics-and-its-been-evading-lab-tests-for-decades","title":{"rendered":"Scientists have found a secret \u2018switch\u2019 that lets bacteria resist antibiotics \u2014 and it\u2019s been evading lab tests for decades"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/scientists-have-found-a-secret-switch-that-lets-bacteria-resist-antibiotics-and-its-been-evading-lab-tests-for-decades2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>For decades, microbiologists like Weiss thought of antibiotic resistance as something a bacterial species either had or didn\u2019t have. But \u201cnow, we are realizing that that\u2019s not always the case,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>Normally, genes determine how bacteria resist certain antibiotics. For example, bacteria could gain a gene mutation that enables them to chemically disable antibiotics. In other cases, genes may code for proteins that prevent the drugs from crossing bacterial cell walls. But that is not the case for heteroresistant bacteria; they defeat drugs designed to kill them without bona fide resistance genes. When they\u2019re not exposed to an antibiotic, these bacteria look like any other bacteria.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For decades, microbiologists like Weiss thought of antibiotic resistance as something a bacterial species either had or didn\u2019t have. But \u201cnow, we are realizing that that\u2019s not always the case,\u201d he said. Normally, genes determine how bacteria resist certain antibiotics. For example, bacteria could gain a gene mutation that enables them to chemically disable antibiotics. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,19,412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-chemistry","category-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194310\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}