Mutations

Jazzlover, you might want to actually check the accuracy of the statements you've pasted above. I'm only going to deal with the Staphylococcus aureus beta-lactamase part. I suggest you check out this link

The Faculty of Medicine

It gives you further information on beta-lactamases, what they do, how many are known and the fact that they are thought to have evolved from cell wall-building proteins in bacteria called penicillin-binding proteins. It will also direct you to other sources so that you can find out alot more about them.You state, or your source does;

An example is the loss of control over the production of an enzyme that happens to break down penicillin in Staphylococcus aureus, resulting in the production of greatly increased amounts of the enzyme and thus conferring resistance to penicillin

In actual fact I think you'll find that beta-lactamase is produced in addition to any protein it may have evolved from such as penicillin-binding proteins. Additionally, in some bacteria the prodution of beta-lactamase is constitutive i.e., switched on all the time and in others its inducible i.e., it only switches on production when penicillins are present. For a gene to be inducible it not only has to have the protein-coding region,it also has to have a promoter, upstream of the start site of the coding region, which then allows transcription to start. The promoter has to be tied in some way to the conditions under which production of the enzyme is required. So somehow the message that the outside of the bacterium has encountered penicillin has to be transmitted to the inside so that the promoter can be activated. How on Earth can a system which involves this sort of message pickup, message transfer and action on message be described as a loss of control? That is simplistic at best and downright misleading at worst.

The new information that the cell didn't have before is how to make beta-lactamase!! Also how to detect the presence of beta-lacam antibiotics!!! Also how to control the expression of the beta-lactamase so that it doesn't get produced needlessly when no beta-lactams are around!!! It didn't possess ANY of this information when it was sensitive to the antibiotic. All of this information is coded in the DNA. That information breaks down to the order in which four chemicals appear - A, C, G and T. The whole of the genetic code is written using just these four chemicals in bacteria, frogs, mice, fish, plants (exceptions are certain viruses which use RNA and even then the only difference is that T is replaced by U, but U means the same thing as T). That's it, that's all the information is!!! It's easy for bacteria to pick up DNA from other bacteria, hell, I use this every day in my work. It's also easy to mutate the DNA changing a few of the letters around. After they're changed around they say something totally different from what they said originally - I think that counts as novel information.