Germs In Soil Find Antibiotics Tasty

[DeSwiss]

Germs in soil find antibiotics tasty

Associated Press
By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer
April 3, 2008

WASHINGTON - Antibiotics for breakfast? The drugs are supposed to kill bacteria, not feed them. Yet Harvard researchers have discovered hundreds of germs in soil that literally gobble up antibiotics, able to thrive with the potent drugs as their sole source of nutrition.

These bacteria outwit antibiotics in a disturbingly novel way, and now the race is on to figure out just how they do it — in case more dangerous germs that sicken people could develop the same ability. On the other hand, the work explains why the soil doesn't harbor big antibiotic buildups despite use of the drugs in livestock plus human disposal and, well, excretion, too.

"Thank goodness we have those bacteria to eat at least some of the antibiotics," said bacteriologist Jo Handelsman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who wasn't involved in the study. "Nature's pretty effective." The discovery, published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, came about almost by accident.

A team led by Harvard Medical School geneticist George Church has a Department of Energy grant to develop ways to create biofuels from agriculture waste. Plants are full of natural toxins, so the goal was to find microorganisms in soil capable of breaking down certain of those chemicals. To winnow down the strongest candidates, they tried exposing these bacteria to what should have been far more toxic substances, antibiotics.

*snip*

Wisconsin's Handelsman says gene pathways involved in metabolism are far larger and more complex than the type of single-gene resistance often seen in human pathogens. "It's not really as bleak as that." And Church agrees his work is "not entirely all bad news. ... It gives us some time to get ahead of it and figure out if it really poses a threat."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080403/ap_on_he_me/antibiotic_eaters">MORE

- "It gives us some time to get ahead of it and figure out if it really poses a threat?"

Right. That'll work just like we're doing with the global warming threat.....
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DeSwiss


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