Look who’s talking
Antibiotics aren’t just for fighting infections. As Julian Davies describes in this article in Microbiology Today, they play a part in the bacterial signalling network:
Microbial products with antibiotic activity exhibit many other types of bioactivity; the word antibiotic describes a specific function, but the compounds are multifunctional. The fact that a particular product has inhibitory activity in the laboratory does not mean that it plays such a role in nature. Antibiotics have a number of effects on bacterial physiology; for example they may affect the ability to swarm or form biofilms, or act as mutagens and induce bacterial lysogens to produce phage. Less well appreciated is the fact that they also affect the function of plant cells and those of human hosts, and may cause undesirable side reactions; these secondary effects often occur at sub-inhibitory concentrations.
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Tags: Antibiotics, Bacteria, Biology, Microbiology, Science
