Posted on 06/06/2008 8:14:49 PM PDT by 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,
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Give me a friggin break. Just because they are resistant to an antibiotic before it's been developed doesn't make the some kind of super time traveling bug. It makes them resistant to a drug.
This is what is wrong with the media, they are so eager to sensationalize everything.
(ducking) Maybe they were designed that way...
I think the headline was influenced by the new version of the movie “Andromeda Strain”, where the disease was sent by the future to stop a sulfur vent mining project / save the environment.
If there were no bacteria resistant to a new antibiotic when it is first introduced, then none would survive to become the dominant type.
Populations of any type are diverse.
I made the mistake of watching that.
As the kids say: It “suktd”.
WHAT? You mean dirt is dirty?
Nah, maybe evolution just isn’t real (macroevolution)..God, The Lord designed them that way..
Happy Ping ;)!
This might be why humans don’t eat dirt.
It might be wiser to develop an antibiotic that uses the bacterium's own systems against it, or to make it more vulnerable to be body's own defenses
Calm down...no one is suggesting the bacteria actually travelled through time it's what we in the business call "hyperbole".
Sure, dig it up! Pass it around, handle it. Just couldn’t leave it alone, could we?
I think the headline was influenced by the new version of the movie “Andromeda Strain”, where the disease was sent by the future to stop a sulfur vent mining project / save the environment.
Wow! I'm glad I gave up on it before it got that far!
http://www.galtoninstitute.org.uk/Newsletters/GINL0409/Powers_of_Natural_Selection.htm
that ...
A very striking example of rapid directional selection since the Second World War has been selection for resistance to antibiotics, herbicides and pesticides. The Murray Collection is a series of reference strains of harmful bacteria gathered between 1914 and 1950
Every strain is
susceptible to every one of the dozens of antibiotics used today. (Jones, 1999).
May be of interest. Well I doubt it, but here it is. lol
ping
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