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question about gcse biology!!

how do antibiotics destory pathogens?

To start not all antibiotics destroy bacteria at least not directly. To explain Antibacterials can be bacteriostatic (prevent them from growing until the immune system can act on them) or bactericidal (result in the bacteria dying due to preventing internal cellular processes e.g., DNA replication). However, this likely goes beyond the scope of your GCSE.

However, I have looked at the pages for GCSEs on bite-size for AQA, Edexcel and OCR which all seem to cover antibiotics to a similar degree. Penicillin and amoxicillin are examples of antibiotics given in the pages. Both are examples of bacteriocidal antibiotics.

Here is the main page: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/levels/z98jmp3 so select which applies to you and I'm pretty sure this is all you need to know. Free science lesson on YouTube is also great and something that really helped me

But to give a short summary they damage bacterial cells so that they die (bacteriocidal) or slow their growth (bacteriostatic) without damaging our own cells. They do this by impacting cell processes. In addition to this many antibiotics are required to treat the burden infections pose as one antibiotic is unable to have a detrimental effect on all bacteria (There are reasons for this but it doesn't seem that you need to know them)

Hope this helps!

(edited 1 year ago)

Reply 2

mai5i3llen

Original post by glitteryma_

how do antibiotics destory pathogens?

hiya

antibiotics are forms of medicine that inhibit the growth of pathogens, they can also destroy them by stopping the mechanism important for creating their cell wall- resulting in cell contents leaking out and ultimately killing the bacteria. Remember they do not work on viruses