LABORATORY INFORMATICS


Overcoming bacterial resistance


Clare Sansom discusses the role of software in the fight against bacterial resistance


What is the greatest threat to civilisation? You might immediately think of climate change, or perhaps of global conflict and the spread of nuclear arms. Many commentators, however, would add another, perhaps more subtle threat: antibiotic resistance. Less than a hundred years after the


first patients were treated with antibiotics, these most essential of modern medicines are becoming less effective as bacteria evolve resistance to any chemical that medics can throw at them. Recent


18 Scientific Computing World August/September 2018


science-fiction writers have explored these themes, vividly picturing the end of modern medicine and even, in the case of Val McDermid’s Resistance, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in March 2017, the end of the world.


Antibiotic resistance, however, is a


natural phenomenon that pre-dates antibiotic development by millions, if not billions of years. It arises simply from the ability of bacteria to counteract threats and stresses of all kinds through evolution.


Keeping pace with bacterial development The only difference today is that some of those stresses are now man-made, chemical ones. The current situation


can best be described as an ‘arms race’ between scientist and bacteria. To misquote US molecular biologist Joshua Lederberg, who won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1958 for discovering that bacteria can exchange genetic material, ‘It’s up to us to use our wits to keep up with [bacterial] genes.’ And computational science has given us some of the best tools to do so. Antibiotics are chemicals that interact with bacteria in such a way that the bacteria are either killed or prevented from multiplying, but that have no similar effect on human metabolism. The first and arguably the most


important class of antibiotics, the penicillins, block the synthesis of the


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