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Researchers develop ‘poisoned arrow’ to defeat antibiotic-resistant bacteria

29 points| pwg | 5 years ago |princeton.edu | reply

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[+] icodestuff|5 years ago|reply
Very cool. I do wonder if it means a guaranteed wipeout of the gut microbiome though. Granted, this is likely to be a last line of defense, but _C. diff_ is nothing to mess with either. Sure, we'll be able to kill that with this too, even the nasty vancomycin-resistant strain, but too long with an empty gut isn't good for us either. We'll probably need to get better at microbiome engineering and probiotic used to compensate.
[+] uj8efdkjfdshf|5 years ago|reply
Well, antibiotic use is associated with diarrhoea and increased risk of C. difficile infections for this very reason. But the gut eventually gets recolonised by commensal bacteria - either from food or from the appendix[0]. In the worst case, we could always resort to probiotics or fecal transplants.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3551545/