A team of researchers led by Michigan State University (MSU) in collaboration with Harvard Medical School and the National Cancer Institute has developed a promising vaccine candidate to fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Using a novel vaccine delivery platform, researchers in the lab of Xuefei Huang, PhD, a professor of chemistry and…

Research led by Baylor College of Medicine shows slowing bacterial evolution using dequalinium chloride could be an alternative route to combating the ongoing problem of antibiotic resistance. “Most people with bacterial infections get better after completing antibiotic treatment, but there are also many cases in which people decline because the…

Before COVID engulfed the world in crisis, another microbial threat loomed large: antimicrobial resistance. In the U.S. alone, more than 2.8 million people acquire antibiotic-resistant infections each year and 35,000 die as a result. Scientists have been warning about an impending crisis for decades as the pipeline for new antibiotics…

Using ‘bacteria eating’ viruses called phages to target antibiotic resistance can be effective, but combining this approach with certain antibiotic treatments will lower the chance of resistance, suggests research from the University of Exeter. Over the last decade much has been published about antibiotic resistance. Pathogenic bacteria and other microbes…

Researchers from New York University School of Medicine have discovered that inhibiting hydrogen sulfide production in some bacteria—such as Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa—could make them more susceptible to antibiotics. Some bacteria have developed strategies to tolerate and survive exposure to antibiotics, a process somewhat different to antibacterial resistance, which…

Mothers who contract bacterial infections during pregnancy are often prescribed antibiotics. It turns out that these women are unknowingly making it more difficult for their children to be treated with common antibiotics when they contract bacterial illnesses in the future. That’s according to a new study that found hundreds of…

A research collaboration led by Ben Gurion University has developed molecular tweezers to combat antibiotic resistant bacteria by breaking up biofilm formation. ‘Molecular tweezers’ are molecules designed with open gaps that can bind to other molecules in a tweezer-like fashion. They are still a relatively new concept, but have potential…

Scientists at Uppsala University in Sweden studying two of the most likely antimicrobial resistance mechanisms have shed light on the ability of bacteria to use random, noncoding DNA sequences to generate de novo genes that express antibiotic-hindering peptides. In one mechanism, new genes with novel functions arise from existing genes,…

Scientists from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) say they have adapted an existing technique to study the melting behavior of proteins so that it can be used for the study of bacteria. Antibiotic resistance is spreading worldwide so there is a strong need for new technologies to study bacteria, according to…

Molecular diagnostics company Curetis announced it has spun out a new subsidiary, Ares Genetics, which will focus on developing methods to determine the genetic underpinnings of anitbiotic resistance in order to develop testing methods to rapidly detect antibiotic resistance in patients with microbial infections. The new company will build upon…

It’s a first—a study that tracks antimicrobial use and resistance through the entire beef production process. And it has surprising results. First, an examination of samples from 1741 cattle yielded no resistance genes. Second, an examination of environmental samples from cattle pens revealed the presence of genes that confer resistance…

A team of scientists at UC Santa Barbara says they have developed a new class of antibiotics that cured mice infected with bacteria classified as virtually untreatable and did so without detectable resistance to the treatment. The discovery paves the way to begin addressing the growing challenge of antimicrobial resistance…

As a graduate student at the Weizmann Institute studying systems biology, Eran Eden frequently found himself with a peer, Kfir Oved, an MD-PhD candidate at the time, playing a “game” in the evenings in their grandmothers’ kitchens while eating blintzes, a classic of Eastern European cuisine. The “game” they played…

Researchers at McMaster University, in collaboration with Laval University, have developed a new method to store, identify, and share bacteriophages, making these lifesaving viruses more accessible to patients in need. Published in Nature Communications, the new technique addresses critical barriers in the use of phages for combating antibiotic-resistant infections, promising…

According to new research published in Science, many bacteria have acquired and repurposed viral sequence clusters that encode tail-like structures to kill competitors. At the University of Utah, researchers from the lab of Talia Karasov, PhD, demonstrated that different bacterial populations had evolved variants of these phage-derived elements, called tailocins,…