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What makes bacterial pathogens so invincible? The accepted dogma is that they are able to adapt rapidly to the changing environment of their host. In a Perspective, Rainey and Moxon discuss new evidence (Oliver et al.) showing that the opportunistic bacterial pathogen, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, that colonizes the lungs of cystic fibrosis (CF) patients, evolves a very high mutation rate. These mutators enable the bacterial population to adapt rapidly to the changing environment of the CF lung, despite the host's inflammatory response and treatment of CF patients with potent antibiotics.
P. B. Rainey is in the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3RB, UK. E-mail: prainey{at}molbiol.ox.ac.uk E. R. Moxon is at the Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford, Headington, Oxford OX3 9DS, UK. E-mail: Richard.Moxon{at}paediatrics.oxford.ac.uk
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In Science Magazine
LETTERS
J. Eugene LeClerc, Thomas A. Cebula;, Jesús Blázquez, Antonio Oliver, and Fernando Baquero (21 July 2000) Science289 (5478), 391c.
[DOI: 10.1126/science.289.5478.391c] |Full Text »
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The causes of Pseudomonas diversity.
A. J. Spiers, A. Buckling, and P. B. Rainey (2000)
Microbiology
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