Question: What type of experiments do you carry out to test out anti biotics and do you use animals during research.

Jess Bean answered on 18 Jun 2013:

Great question!

The standard tests that people to do to test antibiotics in the lab are quite simple actually!

Firstly if you have a new antibiotic you want to know what it actually is, so in the Chemistry department there are many different instruments that we use to work out the structure. Next it’s always useful to know how much of that antibiotic you will need to kill all of your bacteria. For this we do an MIC (minimum inhibitory concentration) test – this is where you grow bacteria with different concentrations of antibiotic and see which concentration will kill things. Further on, you can do loads of different tests! You can work out how the drug actually kills the bacteria – does it stop its growth? does pop it? does it stop it eating properly?

As for if I use animals in my research, no I don’t. If there are ways of not using animal testing, scientists are always the first to use other methods, however they do give the best idea of how drugs work without testing on humans so sometimes they’re used.