Bacteria are slippery little sucker

Bacteria are slippery little suckers. They evolve rapidly, developing resistance to antibiotics and therefore becoming increasingly difficult to deal with.For the first time, researchers in 2018 caught on film one of the mechanisms the microbes use for this speedy evolution.Two Vibrio cholerae bacteria - the pathogen responsible for cholera - sit under a microscope, glowing a vivid green. As we watch, a tendril snakes forth from one of the bacterium, harpooning a piece of DNA and carrying it back to its body.That appendage is called a pilus, and the process whereby the bacteria incorporates the new genetic material from a different organism into its own DNA to expedite its evolution is called horizontal gene transfer.And June 2018 was the first time scientists have directly observed a bacterium using a pilus to effect this gene transfer; it's a mechanism that has been hypothesised for decades.