antibiotic

Examples of antibiotic in the following topics:

• Production of Vaccines, Antibiotics, and Hormones

  • Biotechnological advances in gene manipulation techniques have further resulted in the production of vaccines, antibiotics, and hormones.
  • Antibiotics are biotechnological products that inhibit bacterial growth or kill bacteria.
  • Antibiotics are produced on a large scale by cultivating and manipulating fungal cells.
  • Assays such as the one shown help scientists understand the effects of antibiotics on bacterial species.
  • Discuss the methods by which biotechnology is used to produce vaccines, antibiotics, and hormones.

• Antibiotics: Are We Facing a Crisis?

  • Excessive use of antibiotics in animals or as imprudent medical treatments has resulted in the propagation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
  • Is this the beginning of the end of antibiotics?
  • Another major misuse of antibiotics is in patients with colds or the flu, for which antibiotics are useless.
  • There is also the excessive use of antibiotics in livestock along with the routine use of antibiotics in animal feed, both of which promote bacterial resistance.
  • In summary, the medical community is facing an antibiotic crisis.

• Biofilms and Disease

  • Biofilms, complex colonies of bacteria acting as a unit in their release of toxins, are highly resistant to antibiotics and host defense.
  • Once an infection by a biofilm is established, it is very difficult to eradicate because biofilms tend to be resistant to most of the methods used to control microbial growth, including antibiotics.
  • Biofilms respond poorly or only temporarily to antibiotics.
  • It has been said that they can resist up to 1,000 times the antibiotic concentrations used to kill the same bacteria when they are free-living or planktonic.
  • An antibiotic dose that large would harm the patient; therefore, scientists are working on new ways to eradicate biofilms.

• The Origins of Archaea and Bacteria

  • It has been proposed that the archaea evolved from gram-positive bacteria in response to antibiotic selection pressure.
  • This is suggested by the observation that archaea are resistant to a wide variety of antibiotics that are primarily produced by gram-positive bacteria and that these antibiotics primarily act on the genes that distinguish archaea from bacteria.
  • The evolution of Archaea in response to antibiotic selection, or any other competitive selective pressure, could also explain their adaptation to extreme environments (such as high temperature or acidity) as the result of a search for unoccupied niches to escape from antibiotic-producing organisms.

• Characteristics of Fungi

  • Edible mushrooms, yeasts, black mold, and the producer of the antibiotic penicillin, Penicillium notatum, are all members of the kingdom Fungi, which belongs to the domain Eukarya.
  • Unlike bacteria, fungi do not respond to traditional antibiotic therapy because they are eukaryotes.
  • Fungi are the source of many commercial enzymes and antibiotics.

• Misconceptions of Evolution

  • For example, applying antibiotics to a population of bacteria will, over time, select a population of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.
  • The resistance, which is caused by a gene, did not arise by mutation because of the application of the antibiotic.
  • The antibiotic, which kills the bacterial cells without the resistance gene, strongly selects individuals that are resistant, since these would be the only ones that survived and divided.
  • Experiments have demonstrated that mutations for antibiotic resistance do not arise as a result of antibiotics.

• Deuteromycota: The Imperfect Fungi

  • The antibiotic penicillin was originally discovered on an overgrown Petri plate on which a colony of Penicillium fungi killed the bacterial growth surrounding it.

• Prokaryotic Reproduction

  • This short generation time, coupled with mechanisms of genetic recombination and high rates of mutation, result in the rapid evolution of prokaryotes, allowing them to respond to environmental changes (such as the introduction of an antibiotic) very rapidly.

• Biotechnology

  • The primary applications of this technology are in medicine (production of vaccines and antibiotics) and agriculture (genetic modification of crops, such as to increase yields).

• Importance of Fungi in Human Life

  • Fungi naturally produce antibiotics to kill or inhibit the growth of bacteria, limiting their competition in the natural environment.
  • Important antibiotics, such as penicillin and the cephalosporins, can be isolated from fungi.