New Antibiotic Strategies

With antibiotic resistance increasing and the rate of drug development decreasing, treatment of bacterial infections is becoming ever more difficult. New classes of antibiotic agents are desperately needed. Researchers have now identified two mechanisms that confer antibiotic tolerance in bacteria and could serve as targets for new drugs.

Nguyen and colleagues investigated the bacterial response to starvation, based on the observation that nutrient deprivation — which is common in biofilms — results in tolerance to multiple antibiotic classes. In studies comparing wild-type Pseudomonas aeruginosa to a mutant P. aeruginosa lacking two genes (relA and spoT) that are upregulated during nutrient deprivation, the researchers found that growth res…