Science

Scientists filmed bacteria evolve resistance to 1,000x-strength antibiotics in 11 days

Harvard's Kishony lab built a two-foot-wide petri dish with bands of steadily increasing antibiotic concentration, then released E. coli at one end and filmed it with a time-lapse camera. Within 11 days, descendants of the original bacteria had fought through bands 1,000 times the initial lethal dose, visibly branching and pausing wherever a new resistance mutation had to arise. The 2016 video turned an abstract idea, evolution under selection pressure, into something you can watch happen.

Michael Baym, Roy Kishony et al., Spatiotemporal microbial evolution on antibiotic landscapes — Science, vol. 353, 2016

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