A team of researchers led by James Collins, a biochemical engineer at Boston University of Massachusetts, recently described how silver can disrupt bacteria and showed that the ancient treatment could help deal with the thoroughly modern plague of antibiotic resistance.
“We showed that silver disrupts multiple bacterial cellular processes, including disulfide bond formation, metabolism and iron homeostasis, ” the authors wrote in the study, which was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
The study describes how dissolved silver ions make bacterial cell walls weaker and disrupts cell metabolism to create toxins. Collins and his team found that in the form of dissolved ions, silver attacks bacterial cells by making the cell membrane more permeable and interfering with the cell’s metabolism, leading to the overproduction of reactive, and often toxic to the bacteria, oxygen compounds.
Both mechanisms could potentially be harnessed to make today’s antibiotics 10 to 1,000 times more effective against resistant bacteria, Collins said in a news article on nature.com.
For more information, see the full study in Science Translational Medicine, vol. 5, issue 190. p. 190ra81 or see at nature.com.
We’ve known that colloidal silver has worked for years and now we are finding out the process in the body that tells how silver works. We wish you optimal health and vitality in the New Year.
Rev. Dr. Stephen A. Lawrence
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