Here’s how mysterious ‘last-resort’ antibiotics kill infectious bacteria.

BACTERIAL cell walls; BACTERIA; ANTIBIOTICS; BACTERIAL cell membranes; ESCHERICHIA coli; COLISTIN

To kill drug-resistant bacteria, "last-resort" antibiotics borrow a tactic from Medusa's playbook: petrification. But polymyxin antibiotics crystallize the membranes and turn them into brittle sheets of hexagonal "waffles" (shown in this microscope image). New high-resolution microscope images show that a class of antibiotics called polymyxins crystallize the cell membranes of bacteria. [Extracted from the article]

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