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The problem with killing bacteria isn't that we are lacking ways to do so. Steeping them in a strong acid should make sure they are killed and they should not f

The problem with killing bacteria isn't that we are lacking ways to do so. Steeping them in a strong acid should make sure they are killed and they should not find a way to develop resistance to a strong acid. The problem is we want to kill them, while in human body, without causing too much detriment to the host. To do this, we essentially need to develop something that will cause serious harm to the bacteria and yet not harm human cells. This means exploiting various differences between bacteria and humans. A polymer that kills cell walls indiscriminately is hardly an acceptable solution for a human. Yes, bacteria may not be able to gain resistance to it but also it can't ever be used on a real human because mass cell death will cause too much damage to the human. And "solving the problem of selectivity" will cause bacteria to be able to find their resistance eventually. Because if it is possible to escape your cell wall getting disrupted because you have specific DNA -- a bacteria can gain resistance. I am firmly of the opinion it is not possible to develop an antibiotic guaranteeing the bacteria will not be able to gain resistance to it. Simply -- the resistance can be had as evidenced by human cells. And the genetic material is abundantly available to the bacteria -- they are pretty much surrounded by it while in our bodies. There is always going to be non-zero chance for resistance to be acquired by a cell and then spread to the offspring.

sitharus 3y ago
> To do this, we essentially need to develop something that will cause serious harm to the bacteria and yet not harm human cells. The other problem is we depend on mutualistic bacteria to survive, if we kill all bacteria in our bodies we’ll die of malnutrition. And even worse sometimes the problem is those mutualistic bacteria getting out of balance, so we need to kill some while promoting an increase of others. And those bacteria are constantly topped up from the environment, so we can live in a sterile environment our whole lives. It’s a delicate balance, we can’t just throw anti-bacterial things around without thought.
- onetimeuse92304 3y ago
  Usually antibiotic treatments do kill significant portion of bacterial flora. That's why antibiotics are typically followed by probiotic preparations to replenish our bodies with "good" bacteria. This is not necessarily done to prevent us from dying of malnutrition. The bigger problem is that lacking "good" bacteria, we can have "bad" bacteria take over the void, causing even more problems.
Turing_Machine 3y ago
> A polymer that kills cell walls indiscriminately is hardly an acceptable solution for a human. On the contrary. Animal cells do not have cell walls. They have cell membranes but that's a different thing. Many existing antibiotics interfere with the cell walls of bacteria.
londons_explore 3y ago
> I am firmly of the opinion it is not possible to develop an antibiotic guaranteeing the bacteria will not be able to gain resistance to it. I think the main approach to prevent antibiotic resistance is coming up with a way to prevent bacteria ever coming across a low dose of the antibiotic. As long as we make sure the dose is either huge or zero, antibiotic resistance shouldn't evolve. Unfortunately, humans aren't a well controlled lab experiment - and there will always be people taking a half-dose, or flushing the antibiotics down the drain where they get diluted and suddenly trillions of sewer bacteria get exposed to a low dose and suddenly start developing resistance.
- mike_hock 3y ago
  We don't need to develop an antibiotic that's impossible to gain resistance to. We just need to stay ahead of the cat&mouse game, which can go around in circles. If we start using a completely new type of antibiotics and stop using the old ones for a century, bacteria will gradually lose resistance to the old ones as they gain resistance to the new ones.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >suddenly trillions of sewer bacteria get exposed to a low dose and suddenly start developing resistance. I think you're misunderstanding how resistances work. Bacteria don't "start developing" resistance, if they survive the antibiotic at all they already had resistance by stroke of luck. The surviving, resistant bacteria will subsequently survive and outnumber the dead, not-resistant bacteria and we generally call this "developing resistance", but the resistance itself is down to a simple question of whether it was already there or not. Resistances do not come to existence after bacteria come across an antibiotic. If resistance is there, the dosage won't matter because the resistant bacteria will survive regardless.
  - e_y_ 3y ago
    I think the OP's statement is perfectly fine. We don't really care which of those trillions of sewer bacteria carries the pre-existing genes that resist an anti-biotic; we care when a new strain starts becoming prevalent and decreasing the effectiveness. From our perspective, it's a new resistant strain.
lemmsjid 3y ago
I am as layperson as they get on this subject matter, but I would think that even if your statement is true, perhaps we can get to the point where bacteria need to evolve so much to overcome new antibiotic approaches that they lose some of the properties that make them harmful and transmissible, i.e. it becomes harder for them to exist outside of the host, penetrate the host's defenses, etc. At some point a bacteria would need to seem so like a human cell or beneficial bacteria that it becomes non-harmful.
- erikerikson 3y ago
  https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- dkz999 3y ago
  >... the point where bacteria need to evolve so much to overcome new antibiotic approaches that they... Can't. Changed it a bit for ya. This is the zone we need to be in for any successful treatment. This is also why e.g. humans will never evolve bullet resistance.
  - hedora 3y ago
    Sure you can. This is what happened with Covid (though antibiotics had nothing to do with it). The early, more deadly strains are less fit for transmission to masked and (later) vaccinated populations, so we ended up with less virulent but more transmissible stuff like omicron.
vmarovic 3y ago
> A polymer that kills cell walls indiscriminately is hardly an acceptable solution for a human. Human cells don’t have cell walls, so it would not affect them.
- onetimeuse92304 3y ago
  Funny... you are actually right. But there are also bacteria without cell walls.
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
The thing is, we need to kill bacterias in many other places than the human body: - medical equipment: handles for scalpels, syringes, operation tables... All those things we need to clean again and again. - passage ways: doors, handles, stairs handrails, subway grab bars... All the things that propagate infections in very dense populated areas. - research fabs: hazmat suits, protection googles, fum hood protections,... All the stuff you want to make sure don't end up cross contaminate your batch or escape. So it's still very useful.
- smileysteve 3y ago
  Out of the body, we have a number of solutions; fire, bleach, uv-c, lye; on your list, only the plastics (personal protection stuff) can't cleaned with these many times around
  - notamy 3y ago
    Unfortunately, bacteria resistant to bleach are starting to develop https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/micro/10.1099/mic.0.001418 https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/micro/1...
  - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
    You are not going to bleach a handrail 50 times a day, it's not economically viable.
- hedora 3y ago
  > passage ways: doors, handles, stairs handrails, subway grab bars... All the things that propagate infections in very dense populated areas Sterilizing those often increases disease spread. By default, they are covered with a microbial community that can outcompete things that are human pathogens. If you sterilize it, then you’re either leaving a coating of food (mostly dead skin cells) for pathogens to eat, or a coating of nasty poisons that strip the protective barrier off people’s skins, which undermines their ability to fight off what pathogens they do end up touching.

sitharus 3y ago

> To do this, we essentially need to develop something that will cause serious harm to the bacteria and yet not harm human cells. The other problem is we depend on mutualistic bacteria to survive, if we kill all bacteria in our bodies we’ll die of malnutrition. And even worse sometimes the problem is those mutualistic bacteria getting out of balance, so we need to kill some while promoting an increase of others. And those bacteria are constantly topped up from the environment, so we can live in a sterile environment our whole lives. It’s a delicate balance, we can’t just throw anti-bacterial things around without thought.

onetimeuse92304 3y ago
Usually antibiotic treatments do kill significant portion of bacterial flora. That's why antibiotics are typically followed by probiotic preparations to replenish our bodies with "good" bacteria. This is not necessarily done to prevent us from dying of malnutrition. The bigger problem is that lacking "good" bacteria, we can have "bad" bacteria take over the void, causing even more problems.

Turing_Machine 3y ago

> A polymer that kills cell walls indiscriminately is hardly an acceptable solution for a human. On the contrary. Animal cells do not have cell walls. They have cell membranes but that's a different thing. Many existing antibiotics interfere with the cell walls of bacteria.

londons_explore 3y ago

> I am firmly of the opinion it is not possible to develop an antibiotic guaranteeing the bacteria will not be able to gain resistance to it. I think the main approach to prevent antibiotic resistance is coming up with a way to prevent bacteria ever coming across a low dose of the antibiotic. As long as we make sure the dose is either huge or zero, antibiotic resistance shouldn't evolve. Unfortunately, humans aren't a well controlled lab experiment - and there will always be people taking a half-dose, or flushing the antibiotics down the drain where they get diluted and suddenly trillions of sewer bacteria get exposed to a low dose and suddenly start developing resistance.

mike_hock 3y ago
We don't need to develop an antibiotic that's impossible to gain resistance to. We just need to stay ahead of the cat&mouse game, which can go around in circles. If we start using a completely new type of antibiotics and stop using the old ones for a century, bacteria will gradually lose resistance to the old ones as they gain resistance to the new ones.
Dalewyn 3y ago
>suddenly trillions of sewer bacteria get exposed to a low dose and suddenly start developing resistance. I think you're misunderstanding how resistances work. Bacteria don't "start developing" resistance, if they survive the antibiotic at all they already had resistance by stroke of luck. The surviving, resistant bacteria will subsequently survive and outnumber the dead, not-resistant bacteria and we generally call this "developing resistance", but the resistance itself is down to a simple question of whether it was already there or not. Resistances do not come to existence after bacteria come across an antibiotic. If resistance is there, the dosage won't matter because the resistant bacteria will survive regardless.
- e_y_ 3y ago
  I think the OP's statement is perfectly fine. We don't really care which of those trillions of sewer bacteria carries the pre-existing genes that resist an anti-biotic; we care when a new strain starts becoming prevalent and decreasing the effectiveness. From our perspective, it's a new resistant strain.

lemmsjid 3y ago

I am as layperson as they get on this subject matter, but I would think that even if your statement is true, perhaps we can get to the point where bacteria need to evolve so much to overcome new antibiotic approaches that they lose some of the properties that make them harmful and transmissible, i.e. it becomes harder for them to exist outside of the host, penetrate the host's defenses, etc. At some point a bacteria would need to seem so like a human cell or beneficial bacteria that it becomes non-harmful.

erikerikson 3y ago
https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
dkz999 3y ago
>... the point where bacteria need to evolve so much to overcome new antibiotic approaches that they... Can't. Changed it a bit for ya. This is the zone we need to be in for any successful treatment. This is also why e.g. humans will never evolve bullet resistance.
- hedora 3y ago
  Sure you can. This is what happened with Covid (though antibiotics had nothing to do with it). The early, more deadly strains are less fit for transmission to masked and (later) vaccinated populations, so we ended up with less virulent but more transmissible stuff like omicron.

vmarovic 3y ago

> A polymer that kills cell walls indiscriminately is hardly an acceptable solution for a human. Human cells don’t have cell walls, so it would not affect them.

onetimeuse92304 3y ago
Funny... you are actually right. But there are also bacteria without cell walls.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago

The thing is, we need to kill bacterias in many other places than the human body: - medical equipment: handles for scalpels, syringes, operation tables... All those things we need to clean again and again. - passage ways: doors, handles, stairs handrails, subway grab bars... All the things that propagate infections in very dense populated areas. - research fabs: hazmat suits, protection googles, fum hood protections,... All the stuff you want to make sure don't end up cross contaminate your batch or escape. So it's still very useful.

smileysteve 3y ago
Out of the body, we have a number of solutions; fire, bleach, uv-c, lye; on your list, only the plastics (personal protection stuff) can't cleaned with these many times around
- notamy 3y ago
  Unfortunately, bacteria resistant to bleach are starting to develop https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/micro/10.1099/mic.0.001418 https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/micro/1...
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  You are not going to bleach a handrail 50 times a day, it's not economically viable.
hedora 3y ago
> passage ways: doors, handles, stairs handrails, subway grab bars... All the things that propagate infections in very dense populated areas Sterilizing those often increases disease spread. By default, they are covered with a microbial community that can outcompete things that are human pathogens. If you sterilize it, then you’re either leaving a coating of food (mostly dead skin cells) for pathogens to eat, or a coating of nasty poisons that strip the protective barrier off people’s skins, which undermines their ability to fight off what pathogens they do end up touching.