Cluster Busters Needed

To resist threats like antibiotics, bacteria have various tricks up their sleeves. They can rapidly mutate to create new versions of proteins with potential resistance, they can also share genes from resistant strains to non-resistant strains. This often occurs via plasmids – small fragments of DNA that can be transported into neighbouring bacteria through cellular extrusions known as conjugation pili. What’s more, these pili themselves offer further resistance, according to recent research. The formation of conjugation pili between bacterial cells enables them to lock tightly together into biofilms, thus providing physical resistance too. In the compact bacterial clusters pictured, for example, the plasmid-producing bacteria (red) are passing plasmids to new host bacteria (blue) via pili. While it might seem that bacteria are always one step ahead of human-made antibiotics, ultimately, knowledge is power and these new findings might lead to antibiotics with pili-suppressing capabilities.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by Carey Nadell lab published in James B. Winans and colleagues
• Department of Biological Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA
• Image originally published with no restrictions – hence published here with as Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Research published in Current Biology, December 2025