Even bacteria have baggage—and understanding that is key to fighting superbugs

New research points to treatment strategies for multi-drug antibiotic resistance using currently available drugs. The study, publishing August 8 in the open access journal PLOS Biology by Phillip Yen and Jason Papin at the University of Virginia demonstrates how different adaptation histories of bacterial pathogens to antibiotics leads to distinct evolutionary dynamics of multi-drug resistance. In an era where there are few new antibiotics in the R&D pipeline and bacteria are developing resi