'Time-Travelling' Bugs Resist Antibiotics Of The Future

New Scientist ^ | 6-6-2008 | Ewen Callaway

[blam]

'Time-travelling' bugs resist antibiotics of the future

12:42 06 June 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Ewen Callaway

Bacteria lurking in soil in the 1960s and 70s resist an antibiotic that didn't exist until decades later. Three strains of what amount to future-predicting bacteria showed extreme resistance to six common antibiotics, including ciprofloxacin, which was first sold in 1989.

"You can pretty safely say that there is no way these bacteria have seen them before," says Cristiane San Miguel, a microbiologist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, US. She presented the findings this week at the American Society for Microbiology's annual meeting in Boston, US.

One strain of soil bacteria was even able to fend off a dose of ciprofloxacin that would be lethal to humans.

Dirt seems to be a rich source of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which probably developed such defences as part of the evolutionary arms race that has been going on for billions of years between soil-dwelling microbes.

Many antibiotics drugs come from naturally occurring molecules produced by soil bacteria and fungi, though some drugs, such as Cipro (the brand name of ciprofloxacin), have been developed in the lab.

Bacteria to the future

To determine whether resistance to new drugs can be found in soil, San Miguel and her colleague Robert Tate turned to a company that stocks thousands of strains of frozen bacteria.

Her team revived three strains: two of them opportunistic pathogens called Klebsiella pneuomoniae that were isolated from dirt in 1973 and 1974, then frozen; the third, a bug called Alcaligenes, last tasted agar in 1963.

All the strains flourished when San Miguel exposed them to a range of antibiotics, many still used to battle infections.

Perplexingly, all the bacteria fended off a lethal dose of rifampicin, an antibiotic introduced in 1967,

[hellbender]

a company that stocks thousands of strains of frozen bacteria

All over the world, frozen time-traveling bacteria will be waking up because of Global Warming. We need trillion$ in new govt. programs to save the world. /s

[Wonder Warthog]

What is supposed to be so “earth-shaking” about this discovery??? Most antibiotics are derived from strains of bacteria in the first place, or are modified versions of molecules from same.

[seoul62]

Really? So all that hype of using anti-bacterial products is just a marketing push? When the old method: plain old soap ad water will do?/Just Asking - seoul62........

[Wonder Warthog]

"Really? So all that hype of using anti-bacterial products is just a marketing push? When the old method: plain old soap ad water will do?"

Pretty much yes. "Plain old soap and water" acts by disrupting the cell wall of the bacteria, so they die. Surfactants (i.e. soap) are a standard method for "lysing" bacteria (lysing is that disruption of the cell wall). I suspect that all the "anti-bacterial" products do is cause the evolution of resistant microbes.

[SunkenCiv]

:’) Thanks KoRn.