Bacteria living in soil possess a surprisingly powerful arsenal of means that allow them to resist antibiotics. According to Canadian specialists, the emergence of a new generation of drug-resistant "superbugs" must be feared.
It has long been known: bacteria living in soil produce natural antibiotics, which gives them the ability to cope with toxins produced by surrounding microorganisms and plants. In some cases, the genes responsible for such super-resistance are passed on to infectious microorganisms that affect humans.
Some methods of neutralizing antibiotics are well studied, but Gerard Wright and his colleagues from McMaster University in Ontario (Canada) showed that these bacteria have enormous reserves of such weapons.
The scientists collected soil samples in cities and forests across Canada, and then grew the bacteria living in them in the laboratory. They managed, for example, to isolate 480 strains of the well-known Streptomyces, which possesses an "antidote" to many antibiotics, both natural and synthetic.
These strains turned out to be insensitive on average to eight out of twenty-one preparations; two were able to resist fifteen. It should be noted that previously they had never encountered these antibiotics.
The extraordinary ability to render so many antibiotics useless at once helps soil microorganisms survive in the environment of chemical warfare waged against them by other microbes, fungi and plants.
The work of the Canadian scientists forces a more careful approach to the problem of the "migration" of genes from these antibiotic-resistant bacteria into other specimens, including Staphylococcus aureaus, the culprit of hospital infections, which currently does not yield to any pharmacological means of combating it.
This has already happened before. Researchers believe that resistance to the drug vancomycin was developed by microorganisms not without the help of their underground relatives.
What is to be done? According to the authors of the work, it is necessary, in particular, to test new drugs on soil bacteria as well, to identify particularly resistant specimens, to see what enables them to survive. Then to create preparations that would disarm the enemy in advance. However, the team does not intend to rest on its laurels, because it is confident that a huge layer of such bacteria harbors diverse and powerful weapons that have yet to be studied.