Antibiotic-Resistant Genes Found in Mummy
Genes associated with antibiotic resistance have been found in an 11th-century mummy’s colon and feces, long before antibiotics were introduced.
The find suggests that gene mutations responsible for antibiotic resistance occurred naturally in 1000-year-old bacteria and are not necessarily linked to the overuse of antibiotics.
The research, published in the online issue of PlosOne, began as an international team of scientists analyzed the microbiome of the remains that were mummified naturally in the cold climate of the Andes Mountains.
Found in Cuzco, the ancient capital of the Inca empire, the mummy was brought to Italy in the second half of the 19th century by professor Ernesto Mazzei. It was then donated to the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology of the University of Florence, Italy, where it is currently stored with 11 other mummies
Source and further reading:
http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/antibiotic-genes-found-in-mummy-151020.htm
Paper:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0138135
#history #research #medicine
Corina Marinescu - interesting. But this only means perhaps looking at a different approach to antibiotics? Because, as far as I can tell, the antibiotic overuse is selecting the resistant pathogens more and more, and not creating them. And surely one of the hypothesis for antibiotic resistant mutations would have been that they were dormant old mutations, that came into selection after the increased use of antibiotics?
ReplyDeleteIt seems clear that antibiotic resistance has always been present, it is merely our strategy in using antibiotics that had made it so prevalent.
ReplyDeleteBut this paper is pretty fascinating, after all 99% of the bacteria found in the mummy's colon and feces belonged to the Firmicutes genus, mainly dominated by Clostridia, and Turicibacter.
Let's not forget that nearly 25 million pounds of antibiotics are administered to US livestock every year for purposes other than treating disease, such as making the animals grow bigger faster.
Measures to curb the rampant overuse of agricultural antibiotics could have a major impact. So, to make a long story short...when it comes to antibiotics a different approach is a must.
Very true. Maybe more focus on bacteriophage therapy?
ReplyDeleteI have hopes for nanomedicine :)
ReplyDeleteThe next frontier :-)
ReplyDeleteVery interesting, thanks for share.
ReplyDeleteThat discovery obviously point a cause for genetic adaptation of bacteria to some environmental vectors we still can't recognize, or metabolism.
Bacteria thrive by reproducing fast, which means they need as little DNA as possible, so they chuck stuff overboard whenever they can. The downside is that when they encounter a bad situation they usually don't have any genetic way to deal with it, so they tend to be quite willing to absorb dna from their environment in hopes maybe it'll solve their problems. This can easily be cross-species. As a result, they're very good at acquiring resistance to stuff. It's like trading baseball cards for them.
ReplyDeleteBacteria look awfully like personal computers or smartphones, when you think of chromosome DNA as the operating system, and of plasmids as apps.
ReplyDelete'not necessarily linked' are very carefully chosen words there. I do think it makes sense that antibiotics will cause a natural response in the bacteria to resist the drugs used to fight them, but if this was already occurring naturally, then we have a subtly more complex situation to tackle.
ReplyDeleteDiscovery calls for considering among possibilities, that the future mummy's diet, might actually have contained enough antibiotics to select for resistant strains. Did not the Andean Empires inherit of a tradition of experimental agronomy likely descended from a more shamanic experimental pharmacology?
ReplyDeleteI love history
ReplyDelete