Mad rantings about politics, evolution, and microbiology. Comment policy: say what you want, but back it up with an email address. I don't like anonymous trolls.
New data show that antibiotic resistance genes travel together, at least in E. coli isolated from farms. Lookee, a picture:
These are the major types of antibiotics. Anytime you see a "+", that means that a gene that provides resistance to some or all of the antibiotic in that class*. For example, the second "+" in the first column means that E. coli with a tetracycline resistance gene are more likely than those without a tetracycline resistance gene to also have an aminoglycoside resistance gene. And by more likely, it's usually five to fifty times more likely.
When strains are resistant to multiple classes of drugs, not only are they harder to treat, but it is much harder to reduce resistance, since the use of any single drug 'drags along' all of the other resistance genes (the technical term is linkage).
If this were easy, I suppose we would have solved this by now....
Life Science
Medicine & Health
Comments
That's not a picture, that's a table. Pictures in scientific articles are called figures, and tables are called...tables. That's a table. It says so right on the top.
Posted by: Michael Schmidt | September 12, 2008 3:03 PM
I included this in my introductory lectures back in the '70's. If fish taxonomist knew about this back in the 70's, what is new?
Posted by: Jim Thomerson | September 12, 2008 5:08 PM