Year: 2022

SHAPE MORPHING. "L-form bacteria are pleomorphic, that is, they can change size and shape. During much of their lifetimes they are tiny, about 0.01 microns in diameter. Since they are smaller than viruses or fungal particles, they cannot be seen with a normal optical microscope. The small, individual forms of L-form bacteria are often referred to as coccoid bodies. Coccoid bodies sometimes group together, assuming the appearance of a string of pearls." http://mpkb.org/home/pathogenesis/microbiota/lforms View in LinkedIn

ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANT. "Treatment with penicillin does not merely select for L-forms (which are penicillin resistant) but actually induces L-form growth." Given that they are microscopically invisible, and that they are induced by antibiotics, this makes their medical story very interesting. http://mpkb.org/home/pathogenesis/microbiota/lforms View in LinkedIn

IATROGENIC INDUCTION. "One of the chief suspects for creating L-form bacteria in vivo is the use of antibiotics including the penicillins and the cephalosporins - and this is the method used to create L-forms in the laboratory." And given the over-use of antibiotics, they are likely everywhere. https://lnkd.in/dTCkxDw View in LinkedIn

L-FORMS AND ORIGIN OF LIFE. "Invention of the cell wall may have underpinned the explosion of bacterial life on the Earth. Later innovations in cell envelope structure, particularly the emergence of the outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria, possibly in an early endospore former, seem to have spurned further major evolutionary radiations." https://lnkd.in/d_F2hqt View in LinkedIn

TROJAN HORSE STRATEGY. "Classical forms of most bacterial species can be found in the bloodstream. However L-form bacteria have figured out how to successfully infect and live inside the very cells of the immune system whose role is to kill bacteria. Once inside these cells, they can no longer be detected by the immune system and are able to persist in the body over long periods of time." http://mpkb.org/home/pathogenesis/microbiota/lforms View in LinkedIn

DIVISION ADAPTION. "Remarkably, despite the limited mutational changes required, the new L-form cells completely abandon the normally essential cell division machinery used by virtually all extant bacterial cells, and proliferate instead by a mechanism of membrane tubulation or blebbing." https://lnkd.in/d_F2hqt View in LinkedIn

UNKILLABLE BACTERIA. "People are exposed to L-form bacteria in many places. Because they cannot be killed by pasteurization or chlorination, L-form bacteria can be found in milk, food, and water. They can be transmitted via sperm, intimate contact, and can be passed from mother to child during childbirth." http://mpkb.org/home/pathogenesis/microbiota/lforms View in LinkedIn

UNDETECTED. "Precisely because they lack a cell wall, many antibiotics are unable to kill L-form bacteria directly and they also cannot be detected by many standard laboratory tests that rely upon staining the cell wall. The lack of a cell wall also means that they are able to enter and proliferate inside body cells and also to go undetected by the immune system." https://lnkd.in/dTCkxDw View in LinkedIn

THE BODY IS BLIND TO L-FORMS. "The lack of a cell wall enables them to enter human cells and proliferate because they fail to elicit an appropriate response when the immune system is compromised." https://lnkd.in/dDKztC5 View in LinkedIn

INVISIBLE TO NORMAL LAB TESTS. "The inability of most research labs to culture cell wall deficient (CWD) bacteria has been an obstacle to their acceptance, and reliance on Koch’s postulates has made it difficult to correlate CWD bacteria to specific diseases." Also, invisible to light microscopy. https://lnkd.in/dDKztC5 View in LinkedIn