By The European Times | Created at 2026-07-20 08:31:35 | Updated at 2026-08-04 07:30:51
2 weeks ago
Researchers from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, USA, published end of June that bacterial populations work as a real team to survive when antibiotics attack them. It turns out that they join their resources and help latent (latent – hidden or occurring unnoticed) or sleeping cells to save themselves. The scientists’ analysis explains why it is extremely difficult to destroy some bacteria, but also offers options for improving the effectiveness of antibiotics.
What scientists know so far
The scientific community has long known that bacteria can help each other in the fight against antibiotics. They do this by exchanging genes that actually provide resistance. At the same time, the main task of antibiotics is to kill bacteria or at least stop their growth. However, it often turns out that after taking antibiotics, no matter how small they are, a group of bacteria remains alive.
“These surviving bacteria are not genetically resistant; instead, they temporarily shut down certain parts of their metabolism, entering a state that is similar to dormancy and allows them to withstand treatment and later fully recover. Understanding how survivors form and persist is a major challenge in the fight against persistent infections,” said lead author Professor Christoph Herrmann, a specialist in molecular and human genetics and molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor.
The team is building on this knowledge in all its dimensions in their study of bacteria, their resilience and resistance.
The study
In the current study, Professor Herrmann and his colleagues investigated whether bacteria can directly share proteins, since these are the molecular machines that do most of the work in cells. There is a lot of scientific research that shows that bacteria can share proteins, but the evidence is not clear enough.
To detect so-called protein transfer, the scientists designed a system that is very sensitive and uses the bacterium Escherichia coli.
“We engineered one group of bacteria (donors) to produce a special enzyme called Cre, and another group of the same bacteria (recipients) that contain a genetic switch. It can only switch if the Cre protein gets into the recipient,” says Dr. Alice Shuyen Wen, who is part of the team, about how they work.
The researchers observed that when the donor and recipient bacteria are grown together, there is protein transfer, but under normal conditions this rarely happens. However, when the bacteria are exposed to low and non-lethal levels of antibiotics, the protein transfer increases several thousand-fold.
“We found that the transfer still occurred even after the donor cells were removed, leaving only the fluid in which they had grown. This ruled out direct cell-cell contact and indicated that the proteins had been released into the external environment,” explains Dr. Wen.
By combining biochemical techniques and advanced microscopy, the scientists discovered that small structures called membrane vesicles transport the proteins. The vesicles resemble small bubbles that are made of bacterial membrane. They detach from the cells and float freely.
The scientists then looked deeper. They noticed that the recipient cells showed strong signs of dormancy. They slowed down protein production, their metabolism decreased, and they activated genes associated with persistence, such as HipA.
The researchers concluded that recipient cells with high HipA activity were more likely to take up the vesicles that carried the proteins and survive antibiotic treatment. This is because experiments have shown that when HipA is removed, both protein uptake and survival are reduced.
Protein transfer also helps dormant bacteria survive after being exposed to antibiotics, i.e. exposing cells to an increased concentration of vesicles before the start of antibiotic treatment leads to greater survival. It is precisely the transferred proteins that help dormant cells withstand stress.
The results
“The present work provides direct evidence for horizontal protein transfer between bacteria mediated by membrane vesicles.” It also reveals that antibiotics stimulate the differentiation of bacteria into distinct groups of cells that produce vesicles and take up proteins, allowing persistent bacteria with reduced protein synthesis to acquire proteins,” the authors write in an article with the results of the study, published in the journal Science.
“Our study showed that antibiotics cause a genetically identical group of bacteria to identify themselves into two distinct groups – donor cells, which respond by releasing protein-filled vesicles, and recipient cells, which remain dormant but able to take up proteins from incoming vesicles, which helps them survive,” summarizes Prof. Christoph Hermann, adding that it is precisely this teamwork that allows vulnerable members of the bacterial population to survive in the face of potentially lethal antibiotic attack.
Scientists from Baylor College of Medicine believe that understanding donor-recipient interactions between bacteria opens a new page in the fight against chronic infections and the painful topic of antibiotic resistance.
Illustration: “Antibiotics stimulate protein transfer to persister cells”. – In: Journal “Science”, 25 Jun 2026, Vol. 392, Issue 6805.
Source: https://www.bcm.edu/ Teamwork: An unexpected strategy bacteria use to survive antibiotics
