A New Weapon in the Battle Against Drug-Tolerant Bacteria

The key to battling drug-tolerant superbugs could be keeping them awake. New research into how bacteria go dormant, allowing them to evade drugs, could lead to a method to keep them from hiding.
Bacterial infections are often hard to eradicate because a small percentage of germs are dormant at any one time. These mysterious "persisters" duck antibiotics, then awaken and multiply again after drug treatments stop.
But the mechanisms of bacterial persistence are becoming clearer, and so are ways to combat the phenomenon. A new study in Science Thursday maps out the structure and function of one major dormancy-inducer in bacteria, a protein called HipA. And it suggests how another protein, HipB, neutralizes it.
"Now we know what HipA looks like and how it functions," said lead author Maria Schumacher, a biochemist at the University of Texas' M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. "We can try to develop more specific inhibitors against it."
Scientists could mine libraries of known compounds for
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/01/bacterial-infec.html

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