As antibiotic resistance grows, study showing how superbugs kill others offers hope
Daria Van Tyne did not expect to see changes in a population of bacteria taken from her hospital in Pennsylvania, in the United States.
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Her hunch was wrong, but the results of her recent study point to a potential solution for antibiotic resistance.
Bacteria are ancient organisms that have learned advanced evolutionary behaviours over billions of years.
The particular strain Van Tyne was studying, Enterococcus faecium, exists in the guts of humans and many animals and is hard to kill.
Results of a recent study overseen by Daria Van Tyne point to a potential solution for antibiotic resistance. Photo: researchgate.net
'As a researcher, I'm very interested in how the bacteria that make people sick in the hospital are evolving and changing over time,' says Van Tyne, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine's Division of Infectious Diseases.
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She is the senior author of a recent paper, published in the medical journal Nature Microbiology, which found three new strains of drug-resistant Enterococcus faecium, some with the capacity to completely wipe out their neighbours.
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