Cause of Antibiotic Resistance Identified

The video evidence of the L-form switching is no doubt very interesting, but a more accurate headline would be “One cause of resistance to certain antibiotics in UTIs identified.” Or the original article’s title, which is “Possible role of L-form switching in recurrent urinary tract infection”; see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12359-3

I would love to see data on how common this phenomenon is in various populations of UTI patients (elderly, young, inpatient, outpatient, etc), given different prior exposures to antibiotics; for now it looks like 30 patients were assessed.

There are obviously many different causes of resistance previously identified, going all the way back to penicillinase enzymes inactivating penicillin. As often happens with lay summaries, this makes it sound a little too much like the cause of all antibiotic resistance has been found.

For an article released by a university press office, the grammatical errors are stunning.