Antibiotic resistance in pathogenic bacteria is a growing global challenge. Danish researchers have now discovered that bacteria use a code language to avoid being controlled. Understanding this code language will be paramount to developing new antibiotics in the future. Pathogenic bacteria - such as those that cause tuberculosis and typhoid fever - use a variety of clever tricks against our immune system and the antibiotics we use to control them. One of these tricks is the ability to go "under cover" and hide from the immune system and the treatment by going into a dormant state where they are not discovered. For several years, researchers at Aarhus University have studied the molecular mechanisms