New [University of British Columbia] research on bacteria that cause major problems for those with cystic fibrosis reveals clues as to how it proliferates for so long in the lungs and offers new ideas for treatments to explore.
“Someone with cystic fibrosis has about one less teaspoon of water in the mucous in their lungs, making it much thicker,” said Corey Nislow, a professor in UBC’s faculty of pharmaceutical science. “We wanted to know how the airway environment and the bacteria interact and evolve.”
The research involved a bacteria called Burkholderia cenocepacia. These bacteria usually live in the soil and the environment but they can become opportunistic pathogens in cystic fibrosis patients…
The researchers found that the longer the bacteria lived inside their host, the fewer and fewer toxic traits they retained. They also found that the bacteria’s genome often got smaller over time, suggesting that some of the strains were adapting to the environment inside the patient’s lungs.
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The results provide researchers with a set of genes that are common to all strains despite the huge variability in genome size between bacteria in different patients.
“The next step is to identify drugs that are specific to those gene products,” [Nislow said.] [The study can be found here.]
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