{"id":243378,"date":"2026-08-29T21:02:40","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T02:02:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/airborne-tuberculosis-bacteria-may-mutate-as-they-dry-revealing-a-target-to-curb-drug-resistance"},"modified":"2026-08-29T21:02:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T02:02:40","slug":"airborne-tuberculosis-bacteria-may-mutate-as-they-dry-revealing-a-target-to-curb-drug-resistance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/airborne-tuberculosis-bacteria-may-mutate-as-they-dry-revealing-a-target-to-curb-drug-resistance","title":{"rendered":"Airborne tuberculosis bacteria may mutate as they dry, revealing a target to curb drug resistance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/airborne-tuberculosis-bacteria-may-mutate-as-they-dry-revealing-a-target-to-curb-drug-resistance.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Tuberculosis bacteria released into the air from infected individuals dry out to form infectious particles that are second only to measles in contagiousness. Weill Cornell Medicine investigators have discovered specific mechanisms that enable the bacteria not only to survive drying but also to generate mutations linked to antibiotic resistance. This suggests that transmission involves more than the passive movement of bacteria between people and may be a period during which the pathogen evolves.<\/p>\n<p>Tuberculosis, a lung infection caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTb), affects nearly 11 million people and causes roughly 1.2 million deaths globally each year.<\/p>\n<p>The study, published in <i>Nature Microbiology<\/i>, demonstrated that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41564-026-02437-w\" target=\"_blank\">desiccation specifically elicited a DNA repair response<\/a> that both promoted Mtb\u2019s survival and increased the appearance of mutations that made the bacteria resistant to the antibiotic rifampin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tuberculosis bacteria released into the air from infected individuals dry out to form infectious particles that are second only to measles in contagiousness. Weill Cornell Medicine investigators have discovered specific mechanisms that enable the bacteria not only to survive drying but also to generate mutations linked to antibiotic resistance. This suggests that transmission involves more [\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],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243378","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=243378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243378\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}