Going “off the grid,” like rogue secret agents, some bacteria avoid antibiotic treatments by essentially shutting down and hiding until it’s safe to come out again, says Thomas Wood, professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University.
This surreptitious and elaborate survival mechanism is explained in the online April edition of “Nature Chemical Biology,” which details the research of Wood and his post doctoral student Xiaoxue Wang along with colleagues Breann Brown, Wolfgang Peti and Rebecca Page of Brown University.
