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Antibiotic resistance induced by the widespread use of… antidepressants? - Ars Technica
Jan 26, 2023 51 secs
To assess antidepressants’ potential effects on antibiotic resistance, Guo’s lab grew E. coli in the presence of physiologically relevant concentrations of five commonly prescribed antidepressants for 60 days and measured how well the bacteria grew on agar plates infused with different antibiotics.

Advertisement This group did a ton of experiments to try to determine how this was happening, starting by sequencing the DNA, mRNA, and proteins of the antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The drugs also caused the bacteria to express more efflux pump proteins that shunt antibiotics out of the cell.

The scientists then looked at time-lapse microscopy images of DNA moving between bacterial cells, a process that can enable the rapid spread of resistance genes.

The researchers generated a mathematical model of bacterial evolution, which suggests that antidepressants increase the rate at which both normal bacteria and persisters evolve into full-fledged multi-drug-resistant strains.

Since antidepressants are prescribed and used in such massive quantities, the fact that they can induce antibiotic resistance should not be considered one of the more trivial of their side effects.

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