SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Outwitting Germs That Never Say Die
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
In the ongoing battle between pathogens and humans, bacteria have an unusual survival tactic: playing dead.
Scientists in Boston and elsewhere are increasingly interested in mysterious "persisters"--a small number of cells in a bacterial population that are not growing, but are also not dead. They exist in an inactive state that allows them to survive antibiotic treatment, only to awaken later and grow again.
"Persisters are thought to go into deep dormancy. They become zombies of a sort... resistant to killing by everything, because they don't have active targets [for drugs] to attack," said Kim Lewis, director of the Antimicrobial Discovery Center at Northeastern University. "It's a safety valve for the population."
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