Ask Questions and Construct a Hypothesis: How Does My Antibiotic Work?

How Does My Antibiotic Work?
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How Does My Antibiotic Work?
Antibiotics work through the process of selective toxicity. Selective toxicity can be defined as the process in which antibiotics selects microorganisms such as bacteria infecting the human body and destroys their infectious cells without affecting human body cells.
For them to be helpful in human infection treatment, antibiotics selectively target a certain harmful bacterium without touching the human host cells. The possible antibiotic targets in bacteria cells are the cell wall and proteins (Michael, 2010). They perform synthesis of the bacteria cell walls and also DNA and protein replication.
How Penicillin Works
Penicillin is a strong antibiotic which was discovered by Alexander Filming in the year 1928 when he was examining Staphylococcus bacteria in a petri dish with its lid removed. He observed that the bacteria growth was halted. The cell wall of most bacteria is made up of peptidoglycan, an amino acid macromolecule, and short peptides. Human cells neither require nor make peptidoglycan and this is how penicillin manages to do selective toxication (Cooney, 2014). Penicillin kills the bacteria by interfering with their cell wall synthesis. In the process, it prevents transpeptidation, the final stage in cross-linking of the amino acid macromolecule. Transpeptidations result in the weakening of the cell wall which eventually bursts to kill the bacteria (Cooney, 2014). Since it does n…