Antibiotics, something more than defensive and offensive weapons

Authors

  • Juan Carlos Codina Escobar

Keywords:

antibiotics, homersis, biofilms, ecological fitness

Abstract

The discovery of antibiotics opened a new era in therapeutics reducing the number of people dead by infections. But antibiotics play other roles in the environment that enable the bacteria that produce them to increase their ecological fitness. Antibiotics exert different effects at concentrations below the inhibitory level playing a role in the hormesis process, that is, the ability of metabolites to induce different responses depending on its concentration. These responses range from production of biofilms to bacterial motility or nutritional functions. So, our human point of view of antibiotics should change.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Thomashow LS y otros. Antibiotic production by soil and rhizosphere microbes in situ. In Manual of Environmental Microbiology, ed. CJ Hurst, GR Knudsen, MJ McInerney, LD Stetzenbach, MV Walter, pp. 493–99. Washington, DC: ASM Press. 1997.

Davies J. What are antibiotics? Archaic functions for modern activities. Mol. Microbiol. 4:1227–32. 1990.

Monier JM y otros. Metagenomic exploration of antibiotic resistance in soil. Curr. Opin. Microbiol. 14:229–35. 2011.

Allen HK y otros. Call of the wild:antibiotic resistance genes in natural environments. Nat. Rev. Microbiol. 8:251–59. 2010. 5Lopez D y otros. Structurally diverse natural products that cause potassium leakage trigger multicellularity in Bacillus subtilis. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 106:280–85. 2009.

Lindow SE, Brandl MT. Microbiology of the phyllosphere. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 69:1875–83. 2003.

Hernandez ME y otros. Phenazines and other redox-active antibiotics promote microbial mineral reduction. Appl. Envi- ron. Microbiol. 70:921–28. 2004.

Downloads

Published

2017-03-20

Dimensions

PlumX

How to Cite

Antibiotics, something more than defensive and offensive weapons. (2017). Encuentros En La Biología, 10(162), 206-208. https://revistas.uma.es/index.php/enbio/article/view/17622