There are times when white blood cells in the immune system are able to harm the bacteria responsible for infections, yet there are other times when there is an excess number of bacterial cells in the body.

According to Medical News Today, antibiotics, antibiotics are drugs that are meant to harm or kill the bacteria that can cause human infections.

In 1928, Alexander Fleming, a Scottish physician and microbiologist working at St. Mary’s Hospital discovered a commonly-used antibiotic called penicillin, according to the American Chemical Society.

By discovering these drugs, the number of deaths that resulted from bacterial infections has greatly declined.

During his 1945 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Alexander Fleming spoke about how important this discovery was for the future of medicine.

“Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug, make them resistant,” Fleming said.

In today’s society, however, medical professionals have concerns about the antibiotic resistance that can stem from overuse of antibiotics.

Antibiotic resistance occurs when certain types of bacteria and fungi are able to

In fact, every year in the United States, at least 2.8 million people are diagnosed with antibiotic-resistant infections, of which 35,000 people will die, according to the CDC.

Ella Lunney, ’23, spoke about how resistance to antibiotics can affect the livelihood of individuals who are diagnosed with a type of bacteria that can resist antibiotics.

“I think it is something that is desperately needed,” Lunney said. “Resistance is something that sounds really dangerous and honestly it is really dangerous. Understanding resistance is our best bet to prevent the most harm.”

In 2016, researchers at Harvard University did an experiment to learn about how bacteria move when exposed to certain levels of antibiotics.

To determine the effectiveness of different dosages of antibiotic resistance, the research team created a Microbial Evolution and Growth Arena to determine the ways that bacteria act when exposed to certain levels of antibiotics.

Michael Baym, the first author of the study published in Science in 2016, spoke about the purpose of this experiment in an interview with the Harvard Gazette.

“We know quite a bit about the internal defense mechanisms bacteria use to evade antibiotics, but we don’t know much about their physical movements across space as they adapt to survive in different environments,” Baym said.

The layer closest to the edge of the dish did not contain any drug contents, the next section contained only a small amount of the antibiotic, and the other sections contained a concentration of antibiotic 10 times the concentration, with the center having the highest concentration of antibiotic.

Similarly to this research study, Brian Beck, ’22, is looking at the visualization of bacterial movement, death and survival.

However, for his research project, Beck will use a process known as combination drug therapy to determine how the use of two different drugs can influence the resistance of the bacteria that would normally occur when only one drug is being used.

For this project, he will be using imipenem and gentamicin in order to determine how these two drugs can combat e. Coli infections when used together.

Beck wants to utilize a MEGA plate to evaluate how different levels of the drugs can impact the growth of the bacteria.

“(A MEGA plate) has four separate wells,” Beck said. “The first well has none of the antibiotics in it. Then the next one has your normal drug concentration, then five times, and then 10 times. So each time the bacteria grows across, it’s going to mutate.”

He is hopeful that through this study, he will learn more about the appearance of bacterial cells when they undergo particular mutations.

Learning about the ways that bacteria mutate and evolve will allow for scientists to determine how a combination of different antibiotics can increase the sensitivity of bacteria to the components of antibiotics.

Over time, bacterial infections are becoming more and more dangerous because of the resistance that they have acquired.

Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bacterium that can cause Gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease with the ability to infect men and women, has become resistant to so many different forms of antibiotics that scientists are starting to define it as a superbug.

A superbug is a strain of bacteria, virus, parasite or fungi that can be resistant to most forms of antibiotics as well as other medications that can be used to treat infections.

As of right now, there is only one antibiotic that can treat an infection caused by Neisseria gonorrhoeae, making it incredibly dangerous.

Therefore, by learning more about the ways the combination drug therapy works, there is a chance that Neisseria gonorrhoeae can still be killed by use of antibiotics.