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Nowe badanie opublikowane w Nature Microbiology wskazuje, że susze mogą być dotąd niedocenianym czynnikiem napędzającym wzrost antybiotykooporności bakterii. Naukowcy od dawna wiedzą, że bakterie glebowe naturalnie wytwarzają substancje do walki między sobą – to właśnie na ich bazie powstały antybiotyki. Problem w tym, że bakterie mają też mechanizmy obronne, a my częściowo sami przyczyniamy się do ich rozwoju.

For as long as we've known that soil bacteria manufacture molecular weapons to fight each other, we've been swiping their battle plans. In clinics and hospitals, those turf-war weapons have become miraculous drugs of modern medicine—antibiotics—that blow away otherwise deadly infections. But, of course, there's a dark side of mimicking microbial munitions—bacteria have defenses, too, namely antibiotic resistance. You're probably aware that we're facing a rising threat of drug resistance among disease-causing bacteria, one that is rendering much of our stolen weaponry obsolete and making infections harder to defeat. Often, this growing crisis is framed as a clinical failure: We're overusing and misusing antibiotics, hastening our bacterial foes' natural ability to develop and spread resistance. While this is certainly true, a new study in Nature Microbiology this week identifies a potentially new driver of rising antibiotic resistance—and we're at least partly to blame for this one, too.Read full article Comments