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Bacterial antibiotic resistance has long had genetic origins.
Antibiotics have been used as medications for less than a century, yet today, superbugs with antibiotic resistance are causing headaches for the medical community.
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Antibiotics have been used as medications for less than a century, yet today “superbugs” with antibiotic resistance are already causing headaches for the medical community. How does bacterial resistance arise? Recently, Canadian researchers reported that they had isolated antibiotic-resistant genes from bacterial DNA dating back more than 30,000 years, providing, for the first time through rigorous experiments, evidence that antibiotic resistance genes are deeply rooted in bacteria—and even predate humanity’s discovery of antibiotics.
Researchers from McMaster University in Canada drilled into sediments in Yukon, in the country’s northwest region, and obtained soil samples that had been frozen for more than 30,000 years. They extracted bacterial DNA from these samples. Using rigorous methods to ensure the samples remained free from contamination by modern microorganisms, they confirmed that this DNA originated from ancient bacteria.
The analysis revealed that these DNA samples contained fragments of various antibiotic resistance genes, such as those targeting penicillin, tetracycline, and vancomycin. Building on these ancient DNA fragments, the researchers reconstructed a vancomycin-resistant gene along with the protein it encodes. They found that this reconstructed gene and its encoded protein exhibit identical functional properties and highly similar structural features to those of modern vancomycin-resistant substances.
This finding is hardly surprising, since most antibiotics are naturally occurring substances—chemical weapons that fungi or bacteria use to kill other bacteria. Today, however, they are produced synthetically on a large scale. Some scientists speculate that in the microbial “civil war,” the co-evolution of antibiotic resistance and natural antimicrobial substances has been ongoing for a long time, following a pattern of “the higher the virtue, the greater the cunning of the evil.”
The relevant paper was published on August 31 in the online edition of the latest issue of Nature. This new finding suggests that nature already harbors numerous pre-existing bacterial resistance genes. Under the evolutionary pressure exerted by antibiotics, resistant strains can emerge at any time—no antibiotic is permanently effective.
The first antibiotic, penicillin, was discovered in the early 20th century but did not become widely used until the 1940s. Soon after, people began to notice the problem of antibiotic resistance. Since then, each time a new antibiotic has been introduced, resistant strains targeting that antibiotic have quickly emerged. Preventing the overuse and misuse of antibiotics to curb bacterial resistance has thus become a critical issue in public health management.
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