The Jelly Bacteria… a single-celled candy organism.
But how can this simple creature turn deadly killer?
Find out more coming next!
Oh, the hype, the drama,
who hasn’t been pulled into a breaking news science story?
However, superbugs are a serious and growing problem.
So what’s the big deal?
The best way for us to understand why these pathogens are so dangerous is through their origins.
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Before we get into super bugs, let's go over the basics of evolution.
Evolution is any change in heritable traits within a population across generations.
These changes can be acquired through the passage of genes from parent to child,
like eye color or height,
or through mutations.
How often these traits appear within a population,
or group of organisms from the same species,
can be affected by many factors.
More on that in a minute, we have a mandatory Charles Darwin shout out to give.
Charles Darwin theorised the process of natural selection
during a scientific survey of the world.
During his visit to the Galapagos Islands,
he noted the differences between similar species depending on the resources were available to them.
From this observation, he theorized that nature naturally guides species
towards their optimal genetic state through the survival of the fittest
or survival of the members of a population that have the necessary mutations to succeed.
Since his discovery, we have observed the process of natural selection many times, including with bacteria.
In this analogy, I will be using jelly beans to represent bacteria and my friends to represent antibiotics.
There are many different types of bacteria, many good for humans, many neutral, and some dangerous.
When these dangerous bacteria make their home in a susceptible human, or other organism,  problems arise.
Here I have a population of potentially dangerous jelly bacteria.
So, how do I kill them?
Well, lucky for me, I have friends, or antibiotics,
 
who are jelly bacteria killing fiends.
However, each friend only eats one type of jelly bacteria.
But that's okay, I grab my green jelly bacteria eating friend and we get to work.
At first, everything is going well, all the bacteria are dying.
But look! Some of the bacteria have a mutation!
My friend won’t eat those,
so now that jelly bacteria is free to replicate without the fear of death.
This Jelly bacteria now has the potential to be very dangerous
I don’t have any friends, or antibiotics,
who can kill them.
If I want to get rid of this invader,
I must go through the long process of finding an friend,
or antibiotic, that can kill the resistant bacteria.
Once I do find an antibiotic,
its effectivity is at risk of decline as soon as it is released.
Natural selection quickly favors any bacteria that acquires resistance to the new medicine.
We are stuck in a struggle with bacteria and natural selection.
By using antibiotics we kill the bacteria,
but the pathogens that don’t die acquire resistance.
We research and find other antibiotics,
but the process is expensive, time-consuming
and resistant bacteria emerge almost instantly.
Our best option is to limit the use of our current antibiotics
thereby limiting the opportunities for antibiotic resistance to develop.
To summarize, Natural selection is a process of Evolution
that changes a population through the survival of species members
that have the necessary mutations to survive.
In the example of bacteria faced by antibiotics,
if a bacteria has a mutation that results in resistance to the medicine,
it has the potential to become a superbug.
Thanks for Watching!
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