Imagine an opaque bag in front of you and you wish to figure out what’s inside, what would you do? You can’t open it. So you press and you feel the content, then you might be able to tell whether it is a bag of glass beads or soft balls.
Researchers at IBEC, IRB Barcelona and the UB identify the strategy used by enterobacteria to acquire resistance and pathogenicity.The increase in the number of infections caused by multi-resistant bacteria is a growing public health concern, above all in hospital settings, where infections of this kind may have serious consequences.
New breakthroughs in nanophotonics, however, will shortly enable us to visualise molecular processes at an optical resolution of ten nanometres, according to researcher María García-Parajo, head of the Bionanophotonics Laboratory at IBEC.
El treball, que s’ha publicat a l’edició electrònica de la revista Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), es basa en l’estudi de l’enzim responsable de la síntesi d’aquestes molècules en un virus bacterià.