• Question: Do you worry that more resistant strains of bacteria may be created by work that you do?

    Asked by 05chamberlaink to Rebecca on 20 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Rebecca Handley

      Rebecca Handley answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      Yes, and that often happens. Bacteria are hard to research as they wont do anything unless its beneficial for them! So in many cases when we want to remove parts of their DNA, the bacteria will only survive if we replace the pieces of DNA with something better…usually we have to replace the DNA with another piece of DNA that makes it resistant to antibiotics. I hope that makes sense! We also use the antibiotic resistance as a way to test which bacteria the experiment has been successful on, as all the ones that have failed will die when we add the bacteria.

      So yes, making bacteria more resistant is a very real problem in the work I do. But as a rule, we do not use antibiotics that are used for medicine 🙂

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