A team of researchers at the Duve institute of UCLouvain have made tremendous progress in understanding why bacteria become resistant to antibiotics.
More specifically, the team at UCL led by Jean-Francois Collet discovered more about how the defence mechanisms of these boisterous bacteria work. Initially, it was thought that they only had one layer of defence. It turns out there are actually three layers working together to fortify the system.
The line of defence that was already known was peptidoglycan, which creates a sort of exoskeleton around the bacteria when it’s attacked by an antibiotic, to avoid imploding. According to the researchers, however, it needs to be seen in the context of “the entire cell envelope.” Teamwork makes the antibiotic resistance dream work, or something like that.
With the work of this team (that is: the UCL team), researchers are one step closer to defeating these bacteria, because as Collet put it, the better you know your enemy and the way the enemy defends itself, the better you can attack or undermine defences.
The findings were published in the prestigious journal Nature Microbiology and are a promising discovery with potential benefits for the whole world, showing once again how Belgians are and remain at the forefront of scientific discovery.
