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Yes, exactly. For example, Gram positive and Gram negative bacteria have very different structures to their cell walls, and penicillins tend to be effective for
by Calavar 4y ago
Yes, exactly. For example, Gram positive and Gram negative bacteria have very different structures to their cell walls, and penicillins tend to be effective for Gram positive bacteria, but not Gram negative bacteria. There can be other considerations too. Rickettsial species, as an example, live inside their host cells, so you need an antibiotic that can penetrate into a human cell, which most antibiotics can't.
Basically, there's plenty of antibiotics that are effective against, say, 25% of the critical bacterial species, but very few that cover 90%+. So emerging resistance to any one of those few would be a very, very big problem.
- pfannkuchen 4y agoI had assumed that cell wall formation was such a primitive part of bacteria that it would have developed once and be roughly the same for all species. Thanks for the correction. I suppose there may still be some common sub mechanism that we could target? But we don’t understand the mechanism well enough to do that intentionally. It’s really tragic how little of biology we can simulate today. Thanks for the informative responses!