Even the descendants of regular bacteria can evolve to survive for a long time on metallic copper surfaces that would usually kill them within a few minutes. An international research team led by the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the Institute of Microbiology of the German Armed Forces has succeeded in producing these tiny survivalists in the lab and has been able to study them more closely. The researchers describe their work in “Applied and Environmental Microbiology” and provide indications as to how this development could be prevented.