A 2018 publication by Professor Pamela Yeh is featured in a recent Nature article
A 2018 publication by Professor Pamela Yeh is featured in a recent Nature article, "Antibiotic resistance is a growing threat — is climate change making it worse?".
"In a 2018 study, Yeh and her colleagues exposed E. coli, which grew best at 41 °C, either to a temperature of 44 °C or to a range of 12 antibiotics (deliberately given at low doses to inhibit but not kill all the bacteria)6. The researchers tracked how the bacteria responded to these stressors, and found that patterns of gene expression changed in similar ways for both temperature and antibiotic type. In both cases, bacteria responded to the stress by producing more ‘heat-shock’ proteins. These help other proteins to fold correctly and apparently also help bacteria to survive antibiotic attack, says Yeh. “We sometimes call antibiotics that mimic [the effects of] hot conditions ‘hot’ drugs,” she says."