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Soil Bacteria Show High Resistance to Antibiotics
Miraba writes "Microbiologists have found that soil-dwelling bacteria are highly resistant to antibiotics, even ones that they've never been exposed to before. While this information suggests that superbugs could arise from these bacteria, it also provides the opportunity for testing new techniques in drug development for the future."
An antibiotic is a drug that kills or slows the growth of bacteria. Antibiotics are one class of antimicrobials, a larger group which also includes anti-viral, anti-fungal, and anti-parasitic drugs. They are relatively harmless to the host, and therefore can be used to treat infections. The term, coined by Selman Waksman, originally described only those formulations derived from living organisms, in contradistinction to "chemotherapeutic agents", which were purely synthetic. Nowadays the term "antibiotic" is also applied to synthetic antimicrobials, such as the sulfonamides. Antibiotics are small molecules with a molecular weight less than 2000. They are not enzymes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotics
Full Tilt
Conjugation. Bacteria can exchange the plasmids that impart resistance. They hook up with little tubes between them. The danger here is not in soil bacteria, but in the chance that these plasmids will transfer to infectious bacteria. The significance here is that they discovered that the genetic code to resist 15 antibiotics is all around us in the soil, and it just takes a chance meeting for plasmids to be exchanged and for resistance to be imparted in this way. It is just a matter of time, and it has happened before.
Did you actually read the article? They talk at length about how the soil is, well, a giant germ-warfare zone. Bacteria are all attacking each other all the time. Two of the strains they pulled out of the soil were resistant to 15 of the 21 antibiotics with which they tested. They explicitly mention that many of the antibiotics are already synthesized by competing bacteria. They believed, though, that it was very unlikely that any bacterium would ever have been exposed to all the drugs they were resistant to. The researchers believe the germs are using existing defense mechanisms to apply to new (to them) antibiotics.
Your assertion that 'because no superbug yet exists, none ever will' is just, well, stupid. That's like saying that nothing ever changes... yet, somehow, we have people now, and we didn't forty or fifty million years ago.
The modern world is unique, from an evolutionary standpoint, so none of the existing bacteria will have evolved to deal properly with it. They're working on that. A superbug is only a matter of time.
MRSA is a pretty damn good first iteration.
No pork because it'll be green and glowing soon.
n ome.ap/ "Researchers to map pig DNA"
It's way worse than that - They are going to maike Pork TASTIER through generic engineering! You want to talk scarry? Check out this article: http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/01/20/pig.ge
Horns are really just a broken halo.
This is a critical comment and should be modded up. I was about to make the same comment (so hence I may be biased for my praise of your comment).
http://www.britannica.com/nobel/micro/629_1.html
Waksman was studying soil bacteria when he discovered streptomycin. Numerous other antibiotics were identified from similiar bacteria, so it is not surprising, as you mention, that many forms of bacteria are resistent to antibiotics, since either the soil was the original source for the antibiotic, or the mechanism of action for the antibiotic for which future chemical compounds were screened. For these reasons, I don't see what all the concerns are. Sounds like just uninformed fear-mongering.
there are many ways of 'crossing', ie exchanging of genetic material - through viruses (transduction0, by free DNA(transformation), cell-to-cell contact + plasmid(conjugation).