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[Max™]

Obviously you want to measure it in electronvolts, so we're going to need some method of converting their mass into energy first, wait, what were we doing again?

[redwallzyl]

Obviously you want to measure it in electronvolts, so we're going to need some method of converting their mass into energy first, wait, what were we doing again?

!!Science!!

[Sheb]

So, a Nevadan women died from an infection resistant to all 26 antibiotics approved in the US. Interestingly, it seems that bug didn't have mcr-1, so it's unclear how it resisted colistin. Great news for my funding applications, terrible news for the rest of you.

[Parsely]

So, a Nevadan women died from an infection resistant to all 26 antibiotics approved in the US. Interestingly, it seems that bug didn't have mcr-1, so it's unclear how it resisted colistin. Great news for my funding applications, terrible news for the rest of you.

Funding applications?

[hops]

For the research into a bioweapon without mcr-1, obviously.

[ChairmanPoo]

The... swedes, I think? actually managed to bring resistances down by careful use of antibiotics.

That being said

Given that antibiotic resistance is a disadvantage for bacteria in any environment without antibiotics

IIRC this is not strictly true, as some resistance mechanisms are expressed only in the presence of antibiotics and remain dormant otherwise.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The bad news is that the lack of positive genetic pressure won't cause genes to be lost very quickly when they don't cause any related negative genetic pressure. The good news is that bacteria go through generations at an absurd pace, so its not something that would take an ungodly amount of time from our perspective.

I'd be interested to know if there were any materials we could use to eliminate drug resistant strains by being a negative genetic pressure in the presence of those genes.

[Starver]

Ideally, we'd need to find out how to specfically reward (and thus not casually wipe out, without even trying) strains of bacteria that are vulnerable, such that there balance of favour goes against the more 'prepared' strains.

Maybe we need to culture something like Yakult (i.e. a probiotic) specifically innoculated with Zero-Resistance Staphylococcus Aureus, flood the recipient with that to outcompete MRSA (under carefully controlled conditions) then hit them with a suitable antibiotic Blammy once there's nothing else left to survive.  (Probably includes the patient, though!)

A more technoversion would be raising strains made super-reliant upon synthetic (not naturally occuring) amino acids, to sustain their dominance within the bacteriosphere for exactly as long and as far as the doctors dictate.

But it's tricky. The scene in Jurassic Park with the eggs nobody was expecting comes to mind and we're delibetately infecting ill people with more bugs in both the above cases, whatever the level of care and monitoring...

[Sergarr]

I wonder if there's any research into compounds that are not anti-biotics themselves, but help them by genetically favoring bacteria without anti-biotic resistance features... Hey, Sheb, is there?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

There is always phage therapy.

[Reelya]

Actually a promising discovery is that bacteria "talk" to each other using specific chemicals. TED talk here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXWurAmtf78

One type is strain-specific, and it tells them how many of their "compatriots" there are, and there's some evidence that they trigger systemic attacks once they have a threshold - because attacking too soon means the organism has more chance to identify the attack and create antibodies. So we can try blocking those receptors to trick the bacteria to think they don't have the numbers.

Another type is really promising - it's a universal marker of "we are bacteria". It's put out by all bacteria, and all other strains have receptors for it. Basically this and the strain-specific type of marker tell each bacteria whether they're the dominant type of bacteria and how many "friends" they have. So since these are set receptors, a method to gum those receptors up should significantly mess up bacteria's day.

[Eric Blank]

Well that's interesting stuff. Wonder if bacteria that feel their strain is in the minority of the local bacteria population are less likely to do anything that stresses a host organism.

[Starver]

Being that the usefulness of the evolved "density of friends" sense is finely tuned to trigger/not trigger when it is advantageous/not advantageous to behaviorly change (e.g. to operate in sticky 'cooperative mode' when dense enough to form a bacterial film, but stay in/revert to 'solo survivalist' mode when there aren't yet enough to mass up) I'd be surprised if some other organism weren't evolutionary primed to disrupt this optimum, perhaps by chemically signalling for 'cooperative' when it just wastes the thin poplation's time or neutralising a colony back to 'solo' when that wastes time.

(Although both effects could be tricky, with the trigger to trigger each counter-measure being clearly also detriggered by the counter-measure, unless there's a small difference in the negative biofeedback loop pathway, and then bacteria could evolve better recognition of 'fake' trigger conditions.  Anyway...  Still worth looking for one or the other weaponised fakeries in anti-bacteria behaviours.)

One interesting possibilty for medicinal use, occurs to me: anti-plaque mouth-spray (or even additional to standard mouth-wash action) that discombobulates the colonies of mouth bacteria out of their reveries of thinking/knowing that they should be forming a film, to help other oral hygene methods get past the whole 'stonger together' behaviour.  (Just investigate the effects of fuller ingestion of the signal upon the gut biome, friend and foe alike, obviously.)

Probably alrady being looked at, but these are my initial thoughts.

[ChairmanPoo]

we're delibetately infecting ill people with more bugs in both the above cases, whatever the level of care and monitoring...

That is one reason why this wouldnt work.
Other reasons that I can think of right now: bacteria share genetic material between themselves, and more likely than not anything that provides a competitive advantage doubles as a virulence factor.

That being said, probiotics have some strong defenders (and detractors) in HSCT in regards to gut flora and gvhd

[wierd]

One possible scenario is to redirect microbiome evolution, by introducing a synthetic mechanism into a small subset of the population of these disease causing microbes.

Getting hammered with heavy hitting antibiotics is a strong evolutionary pressure source (which is why less energy efficient, but better tolerant of the antibiotics in play populations of microbes take over), and giving the microbes a less energy wasteful solution space to follow to avoid being hammered with said antibiotics would cause them to rapidly overtake their less efficient, drug resistant cousins.

EG, create "Troll" germs.  They disrupt the dangerous biofilm production habit by throwing off the signaling mechanism, keeping the germ populations from being disease causing (and thus in need of treatment with heavy antibiotics), which better assures the survival of the diverse group than does adopting expensive resistance features.

Would need a LOT of safety testing though.