What is it about?
Organisms compete to survive. Our usual focus in the human airway is on the effect that organisms have on the person. However, the interactions between bacteria can change the makeup of the organisms, and those changes can have large effects on the path and severity of lung disease in CF.
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Why is it important?
We looked at eight different organisms that have been cultured commonly from the sputum of patients with CF. Many have strong interactions that change the likelihood of persistence from one year to the next. These interactions can both increase and decrease persistence and are in addition to any efforts to eradicate infections using antibiotics.
Perspectives
The findings might help explain why we often have unexpected outcomes of antibiotic treatment. They also explain why we often see some specific organisms replacing other organisms. The findings may help us think of new ways to approach infection, for example, by treating a mutually supportive pair of organisms rather than one or the other, or treating some organisms with the goal of reducing the persistence of yet other organisms. Another line of thinking concerns how organisms physically and chemically interact. The evidence supports the idea that the organisms in the airway are using new types of antibiotics to compete with one another. This suggests that the airway may be reasonable place to search for organisms that produce antibiotics that are already capable of treating human pathogens. Our hope is that readers will thoughtfully consider the impact that microbe-to-microbe interaction may have that alters the outcomes of treatments.
Theodore Liou
University of Utah
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Microbial Interactions in the Cystic Fibrosis Airway, Journal of Clinical Microbiology, May 2018, ASM Journals,
DOI: 10.1128/jcm.00354-18.
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