Question: How do you think advances in microbiology Will be made.

Melissa Brereton answered on 11 Mar 2013:

Microbiology is a really important field. It was only in the news today that we need to develop new antibiotics because it is predicted that in 20 years, bacteria will become resistant to the existing drugs. This means that people could die of deadly infections so we really need to develop new antibiotics!

I think that recently, science has really advanced in the use of DNA technology which means we can really understand how genes are made up and so we can try and alter them in some way. It might become possible for new antibiotics to change the DNA in bacteria so they cannot survive. At the moment antibiotics kill bacteria by stopping them growing and they target lots of different types of bacteria. If we try and develop new drugs that change the DNA in specific types of bacteria, it may be possible to stop them from developing resistance. It might also be possible to begin to understand why bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics so that we can stop this from happening in the future. This could be done by looking at what happens to the genes in bacteria before and after they develop resistance.