A4-month-old infant had been running a moderate fever for36 hours, and a nervous mother made a call to her pediatrician.Examination and tests revealed no outward signs of infectionor cause of the fever. The anxious mother wanted a prescription for antibiotics, but the pediatrician recommended watching the infant for two days before making a decision. He explained that decades of rampant use of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture has caused a global surge in antibiotic-resistant bacteria, drastically reducing the effectiveness of antibiotic therapy for infections. He pointed out that bacteria can exchange antibiotic resistance traits and that many pathogenic strains are now resistant to several antibiotics. The mother wasnot placated by these explanations and insisted that her baby receive antibiotics immediately. This situation raises several issues. Question:If you were an anxious parent of the patient, would it change your mind if you learned that a woman died in 2016 from a bacterial infection that was resistant to all 26 antibiotics available in the United States?
Genetic Recombination
Recombination is crucial to this process because it allows genes to be reassorted into diverse combinations. Genetic recombination is the process of combining genetic components from two different origins into a single unit. In prokaryotes, genetic recombination takes place by the unilateral transfer of deoxyribonucleic acid. It includes transduction, transformation, and conjugation. The genetic exchange occurring between homologous deoxyribonucleic acid sequences (DNA) from two different sources is termed general recombination. For this to happen, an identical sequence of the two recombining molecules is required. The process of genetic exchange which occurs in eukaryotes during sexual reproduction such as meiosis is an example of this type of genetic recombination.
Microbial Genetics
Genes are the functional units of heredity. They transfer characteristic information from parents to the offspring.
A4-month-old infant had been running a moderate fever for
36 hours, and a nervous mother made a call to her pediatrician.
Examination and tests revealed no outward signs of infection
or cause of the fever. The anxious mother wanted a prescription for antibiotics, but the pediatrician recommended watching the infant for two days before making a decision. He explained that decades of rampant use of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture has caused a global surge in antibiotic-resistant bacteria, drastically reducing the effectiveness of antibiotic therapy for infections. He pointed out that bacteria can exchange antibiotic resistance traits and that many pathogenic strains are now resistant to several antibiotics. The mother was
not placated by these explanations and insisted that her baby receive antibiotics immediately. This situation raises several issues.
Question:If you were an anxious parent of the patient, would it change your mind if you learned that a woman died in 2016 from a bacterial infection that was resistant to all 26 antibiotics available in the United States?
Antibiotics are products produced naturally by microbes or semi-synthetically industrially which kills other microbes or decreases their number. They do so via various mechanisms some of which are by inhibiting cell wall biosynthesis of the pathogen or by inhibiting the protein synthesis of the pathogen etc. Antibiotics, as the name, suggests only affect bacteria and not virus or fungi.
To overcome the damaging effects of antibiotics, bacteria have a few of their own mechanisms. For example, the efflux pump which "throws" out the antibiotic that just inserted their cytoplasm, or by producing enzymes that attacks the antibiotics only, like beta-lactamase enzyme that attacks the beta-lactam antibiotics and renders it useless. Other than such mechanisms, one another way is there which is very common among bacteria. Antibiotic resistance plasmids. The antibiotic resistance genes are those genes that help the bacteria to survive even in the presence of a particular antibiotic. These genes are present in gene cassettes and these gene cassettes when entering a plasmid, they are called antibiotic resistance plasmids.
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