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Million-Year-Old 'Hero Bug' Emerges From Cave

posted by on Tuesday December 13 2016, @03:37PM   
from the and-now-it-has-escaped dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Scientists have found a superbug— hidden 1,000 feet underground in a cave — which is resistant to 70 percent of antibiotics and can totally inactivate many of them.

But here's the kicker. This bacterium has been isolated from people, society — and drugs — for 4 million years, scientists report Thursday in the journal Nature Communications.

That means it hasn't been exposed to human drugs in a clinic or on a farm that uses them. But it has the machinery to knock out these drugs. And that machinery has been around for millions of years.

...

Because, Barton says, the bacterium is helping scientists understand where antibiotic resistance comes from and, hopefully, new ways to stop it. And the bacterium — called Paenibacillus (pronounced "penny-bacillus") — isn't pathogenic. It won't hurt you. It's just capable of evading many, many antibiotics.

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Original Submission

• summary misleading summary misleading (Score: 3, Informative) by Taibhsear on Tuesday December 13 2016, @04:02PM

  by Taibhsear (1464) on Tuesday December 13 2016, @04:02PM (#440827)

  The summary seems misleading.

  From summary:

  That means it hasn't been exposed to human drugs in a clinic or on a farm that uses them. But it has the machinery to knock out these drugs.

  This makes it sound like it's immune to all antibiotics but it's not.

  From article:

  Now there's one big caveat. This "hardwired" resistance is true only for natural antibiotics... But some antibiotics are manmade. "The bacteria in the cave have never been exposed to these antibiotics," Barton says. "So they're still sensitive them."

  So it didn't magically have defenses to antibiotics made by humans that it has never encountered.

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• Re:summary misleading (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 13 2016, @04:22PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 13 2016, @04:22PM (#440831)

  it didn't magically have defenses to antibiotics made by humans that it has never encountered

  Even if the bacteria was resistant to drugs that it never encountered, magic isn't necessary because drug-resistance sometimes is broad (up-regulation of export pumps, general stress responses, sporulation, etc.).

  I mention this because drug-resistance isn't something that is intelligently designed and I can imagine that some may think it is an irreducibly complex problem.

  Parent

• Re:summary misleading (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday December 13 2016, @09:05PM

  by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday December 13 2016, @09:05PM (#441007)

  which is resistant to 70 percent of antibiotics and can totally inactivate many of them.

  This makes it sound like it's immune to all antibiotics but it's not.

  resistant to 70 percent of antibiotics

  A) resistant != immune
  B) Nobody is saying it's resistant to all of them either? Did we read the same summary?

  And as for the magic thing, I guess it's up to you whether you want to call random mutations magic or not. If your house develops a leak in the roof over your bathtub, do you call the bathtub's presence magic?

  --
  "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"

  Parent