Inside the Lechuguilla cave

Antibiotic resistant bacteria are an increasing threat to our health care system. Because antibiotics are over-prescribed and also administered to livestock in their feed, bacteria have developed mechanisms to withstand antimicrobial drugs. As bacteria evolve to evade current antibiotics they become harder and harder to treat. While this may appear to be a problem created by modern medicine, there is evidence that the ability to develop drug resistance mechanisms is hard wired in bacteria. A group of scientist have uncovered species of drug resistant bacteria in a 4 million year old cave. From Scientific American:

But the capacity to fend off antibiotics might actually be lodged deep in bacteria’s evolutionary history. A new study has uncovered dozens of species of bacteria in a 4 million-year-old cave that harbor resistance to both natural and synthetic antibiotics.

A team of researchers descended to 400 meters in distant, untrafficked reaches of Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico to collect samples of bacteria. Few people have entered the cave’s deepest regions since its discovery in 1986, and surface water takes thousands of years to percolate through the nearby dense Yates Formation rock down to the cave. As a consequence, the area is a prime place to study naturally occurring antibiotic resistance, noted the researchers, whose results were published online April 11 in PLoS ONE.

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Wright and his colleagues found that of the 93 bacterial strains tested from the cave, most were resistant to more than one of the 26 different antimicrobials. And some bacteria were resistant to more than a dozen antibiotics used by doctors, such as telithromycin, ampicillin and daptomycin, which is currently a treatment of last resort to combat resistant infections. The cave bacteria were not likely to cause infection in humans, but could provide the genetic traits that confer resistance to that are.

Check out the research article on PLoS ONE.