In 1928, Scottish microbiologist Alexander Fleming discovered what we know today as penicillin. Fleming’s work and that of his successors would go on to forever change how we treat bacterial infections. And to this day, antibiotics are one of the most powerful tools we have to protect people from a host of harmful bacteria.But those same antibiotics can decimate the “good” microbes that live in our guts, opening the door to a host of potential health complications, including painful bouts of diarrhea that can take months to resolve. In recent years, some doctors have begun prescribing probiotics to help offset the harm antibiotics can do to gut bacteria, but the problem with that approach is that they’re just as susceptible to antibiotics and are not a replacement for those microbes.Enter researchers from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a study published on Monday in the journal Nature Biomedic
