Small Things Considered reports on a scientific finding that shows that antibiotic resistance in bacteria strains taken from soil samples is fairly common.  Even though in some of these samples, they would be unlikely to have come into contact with man-made antibiotics.  Testing 18 antibiotics from man-made and natural sources against 11 different samples, researchers did not find any sample that didn’t have bacteria that could metabolize at least 1 antibiotic. 

Its an interesting find, which has implications for medicine and health, but is it surprising?  I would tend to disagree.  Given the rate that bacteria can evolve antibiotic resistance, it stands to reason that there should bacteria exist in nature that can metabolize them.

I quote Paul Orwin who left a comment in the above blog post:

I thought it was fairly clear that in the environment, there are lots of bacteria making antibiotics, and others that can break them down and/or resist them… I can’t see any way that this doesn’t affect clinical use of antibiotics. First, we know that there is plenty of movement of bacteria between soil and host organisms. Second, we know there is plenty of gene transfer going on in both environments. Therefore, there is a very high probability that within a soil microbial population, there is a potential pathogen (Burk and Pseudo being pretty strong contenders) that eats antibiotics for breakfast.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 13th, 2008 at 10:08 am and is filed under evolution, medicine, microbiology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.