Final (Natural Selection and Antibiotic Resistance) - Research Paper Example

Through this process, bacteria can become resistant to antibiotics. This genetic mutation may be spontaneous, or induced by horizontal gene transfer through conjugation, transduction and transformation. The use of antibiotics can increase selective pressure in a bacterial population that will lead to thriving of resistant bacteria and death of vulnerable bacteria. In this regard, the resistant bacteria will reproduce offspring that is resistant to antibiotics. In general bacterial resistance may be in form of change in permeability of the cell that prevents entry of the antibiotics or pumping the antibiotic out of the cell, acquiring the ability to inactivate the antibiotic or acquisition of mutations that modifies the target of an antibiotic.

Common resistant bacteria include; methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, and vanmyocin-resistant S. aureus (Wright, 2005). Antibiotics have different modes of action that is either through inhibiting bacterial growth by inhibiting bacterial cell wall biosynthesis or blocking bacterial protein synthesis by binding to RNA preventing translation. Ampicillin is a beta-lactam or beta-lactamase inhibitor combination with a broad spectrum of antibacterial activity against Gram-positive, Gram negative and anaerobic bacteria.

Ampicillin is a significant drug in the therapeutic drug for lower respiratory tract infections, intra-abdominal infections, gynaecological infections, skin and soft tissue infections. In this experiment a single colony was used to as a starting material to grow a culture of bacteria. Therefore the cells in the colony will be genetically identical because they have the same mother cell. The genetic variation in the colony will only be a result of accumulation of random mutations. The main aim of this experiment is to determine if random mutations in the population will result to a small number of cells to become resistant to antibiotics