Global Biological Experiment Generates Exciting New Results 340
New submitter hoboroadie writes "Scientific American Magazine says antibiotic-resistance genes have moved from the incubators of our hospitals and factory farms, and are spreading through diverse species in the wild. Resistance genes have been detected in crows, gulls, houseflies, moths, foxes, frogs, sharks and whales, as well as in sand and coastal water samples from California and Washington. This stuff is getting more and more like a Hollywood script everyday, n'est ce pas?"
PBS Frontline "Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria" (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hunting-the-nightmare-bacteria/ [pbs.org]
Scariest thing I've watched in a long time.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Informative)
Re:But.. (Score:4, Informative)
it takes more effort to be antibiotic resistant than not. That means, absent the use of antibiotics, the resistance will naturally be selected against and fade from the population over time.
Actually, this (often) isn't the case.
It's obvious in theory that antibiotic resistance may or may not have a cost associated - but without any selection pressure, whether the resistance evolves is down to luck. Add the antibiotic and the selection is driven but remove the antibiotic again and the selection pressure doesn't need to be back towards the original state.
What is perhaps more surprising is that reversion to antibiotic susceptibility in the absence of the antibiotic is relatively rare - what actually tends to happen is that there are other mutations driven by the absence of the antibiotic rather than loss of the resistance.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/13/163 [biomedcentral.com]
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.12158/abstract [wiley.com]
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/11/14 [biomedcentral.com]
The third one is interesting in that it says that sometimes antibiotic resistance can evolve due to a selection pressure unrelated to the antibiotic. If antibiotic resistance was very costly then you wouldn't expect to see this.
Re:But.. (Score:4, Informative)
Mod parent up. This is one of the most insightful comments I've seen on Slashdot today; it both gets to the root of the matter, and generalizes well to many related issues.