For decades, antibiotics have been humanity's frontline defense against bacterial infections, yet these essential medications have also led to the rise of drug-resistant "superbugs." Now, researchers have discovered an ancient strain of bacteria that managed to develop this superpower thousands of years before humans ever invented antibiotics.
A study published Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology describes Psychrobacter SC65A.3, a bacterial strain discovered frozen inside 5,000-year-old layers of cave ice in Romania. Testing revealed that SC65A.3 is resistant to 10 modern antibiotics and carries more than 100 genes linked to resistance despite never being exposed to these drugs.
"Studying microbes such as Psychrobacter SC65A.3 retrieved from millennia-old cave ice deposits reveals how antibiotic resistance evolved naturally in the environment, long before modern antibiotics were ever used," co-author Cristina Purcarea, a senior scientist at the Institute of Biology Bucharest of the Romanian Academy, said in a release.
Antibiotic resistance is an urgent threat to global public health. In the U.S. alone, more than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur each year, and more than 35,000 people die as a result, according to the CDC's 2019 Antibiotic Resistance Threats Report.
This threat has grown in tandem with the rise of antibiotic use. Antibiotic resistance is a classic example of natural selection: when microbes are exposed to a drug, most die, but a few survive thanks to protective genetic traits. Those survivors then pass their resistance genes onto the next generation, which passes them on to the next, giving rise to superbugs.
While exposure to antibiotics amplifies the prevalence of resistance genes, it does not imbue microbes with these protective traits. Those arise naturally through random genetic mutations and the constant pressure to out-perform other microorganisms in the environment, many of which produce their own antimicrobial compounds.
The ancient Psychrobacter SC65A.3 strain is a perfect example of how these natural processes lead to antibiotic resistance. Purcarea and her colleagues found it inside an 82-foot (25-meter) ice core they extracted from Scarisoara Ice Cave in northwestern Romania. The core represents 13,000 years of climatic history, including the 5,000-year-old ice layers that contained SC65A.3.
In the lab, the researchers isolated various bacterial strains from the core and sequenced their genomes to determine which genes allowed the strain to survive such low temperatures and which promote antimicrobial resistance. When they tested SC65A.3 against 28 widely used antibiotics, they found it was resistant to more than a third of them.
"The 10 antibiotics we found resistance to are widely used in oral and injectable therapies used to treat a range of serious bacterial infections in clinical practice," including tuberculosis, colitis, and urinary tract infections, Purcarea explained.
The findings underscore a frequently overlooked public health threat associated with climate change, according to the study's authors.
"If melting ice releases these microbes, these genes could spread to modern bacteria, adding to the global challenge of antibiotic resistance," Purcarea said. As the global temperature rises, the risk of releasing ancient superbugs into the environment grows. Studying these bacterial strains, however, can also lead to the discovery of unique enzymes and antimicrobial compounds that inspire new drugs and other biotechnological innovations, Purcarea noted.
The SC65A.3 genome contains 11 genes that may be able to kill or stop the growth of other bacteria, fungi, and viruses, for example. It also contains nearly 600 genes with unknown functions, suggesting that many more novel biological mechanisms could be hiding in this superbug's DNA.
"These ancient bacteria are essential for science and medicine," Purcarea said, "but careful handling and safety measures in the lab are essential to mitigate the risk of uncontrolled spread."
Reference:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20, @10:51PM (7 children)
Ancient bacteria that is already resistant. Who would have figured?
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Snospar on Friday February 20, @11:43PM (6 children)
Indeed, the phrase "reveals how antibiotic resistance evolved naturally in the environment, long before modern antibiotics were ever used" makes no sense. Antibiotic resistance cannot develop in the absence of antibiotics. I smell shite.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 21, @01:12AM
Wash your hands.
(Score: 5, Informative) by weirsbaski on Saturday February 21, @02:42AM
Not all medical compounds are first developed in the lab. This is an anti-cancer not an antibiotic, but:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxorubicin#History [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday February 21, @06:18AM
There are a couple ways it makes sense. The story is sloppily talking about human sources of antibiotics above. There's plenty of non-human organisms that can produce these naturally. So one possible implication of the research is that the bacteria in question are exposed enough to chemicals similar enough to modern antibiotics to generate resistance. Another possibility is that the frozen environment may also make antibiotics more effective - maybe a lower bacteria metabolism combined with less fluid in the environment to dilute these chemicals. That may result in heavy selection for bacteria that have wide range of antibiotic resistance.
(Score: 3, Informative) by owl on Saturday February 21, @04:28PM (1 child)
What you smell is the fact that the journalist was likely an "english major" in college, and upon finding little opportunity for employment as an "english major" pivoted to being a "journalist" because that let them "write English prose for a living" and so not feel like their degree was essentially "basket weaving".
What they likely meant, but tortured the technical side so badly, was that it is not surprising an ancient bacteria might be resistant to modern antibiotics. Most antibiotics in use today have their chemical roots firmly in the bacterial/fungal world. I.e. they are either a compound directly created by some bacteria/fungus (e.g., Penicillin from mold) or a not very changed compound from one that was found to be created by a bacterial/fungus. Which means while "modern antibiotics" did not exist back then (as in compound X from Pfizer) the chemicals that are used as the basis for the human antibiotics did exist. Which would explain how this bacteria could have obtained resistance. In its world before it was locked in this ice, it likely had other bacteria/fungi creating the compounds that are our modern antibiotics, or are the precursors to our modern antibiotics in its environment, and therefore it was exposed, and able to evolve resistance.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday February 21, @06:41PM
An alternative analogy:
25K years ago there was a population balance of bison/protocows and wolves
Humans were like, huh, cows taste good so we will out-wolve the wolves, we will fence in a pasture and hire shepherds and cowboys and grow hundreds, even thousands, of cows
Industrial culture happens and we have Big Macs available at drivethru fast food restaurants.
"Its a conspiracy theory that bison existed in the wild obviously they did not have Big Macs in the fossil record 25K years ago"
Antibiotics really are the same. Huh some molds and yeasts and other bacteria will F with enemy bacteria using chemical warfare. What if instead of a natural balance we isolated and grew extreme amounts of the good microbes, that make stuff, that kills enemy bacteria? And thats the post WWII antibiotics industry, pretty much.
It's perfectly normal and natural stuff you'd find in your backyard, its just that the only thing immune to it is the microbes that make it (usually humans are not entirely immune just hurt a lot less than the enemy microbes) and we "industrially factory farm" enormous amounts of the helper microbes beyond anything you'd ever find in nature.
Its interesting that the Romans had ZERO problems factory farming yeasts on a huge scale for breads and booze and vinegar fermentations etc, so its just a bit of bad luck that we didn't have antibiotics until post-WWII, there's no technical reason I can immediately think of that a competent Roman brewer couldn't figure out early antibiotics, if they had the slightest idea something like that would be possible.
The idea sounds crazy, if an animal (human) is infected and dying because of infection from one microbe, why not use yet another microbe's chemical warfare compounds to kill the infectious microbes? I can't think of anything similar from the past.
(Score: 2) by ese002 on Monday February 23, @08:30PM
Bacteria and fungi (the source of antibiotics) have been at war for a billion years. Susceptibility to modern antibiotics may be a recent phenomenon, possibly a consequence of mutations that gave improved resistance to older antibiotics.
Alternatively, modern antibiotics aren't really that new. There were fungi more than 5000 years ago producing similar enough substances to provoke resistance in the ancestors of these bacteria.
(Score: 3, Touché) by looorg on Saturday February 21, @02:13AM
Why are we defrosting superbugs? That sounds like the plot to some "The Blob" horror movie.
(Score: 2) by weirsbaski on Saturday February 21, @02:51AM (3 children)
So I get that the bacteria was frozen for 5000 years, but what stopped it from virtually taking over the microscopic world before that (instead of being limited to caves in Romania)?
(Score: 3, Touché) by krishnoid on Saturday February 21, @05:08AM
Well, that's an opening line for a trailer.
(Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Saturday February 21, @05:39AM
It can only eat batshit icecream and evolved all of those gene to resist covid, hendra, marburg, nipah, rabies and ebola viruses.
No, seriously now [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday February 21, @06:13PM
TANSTAAFL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch [wikipedia.org]
Extremeophiles can survive in extremes of, well, anything, but the energy cost of being able to survive something weird, can be pretty expensive.
So if you're not being carpet bombed by some other bacteria or yeast or chemical antibiotic plant's chemical warfare molecules, every competing microbe that has a more even "DnD style build balance" will, generally, outcompete the specialist.
If you have a monoculture farm, or even a grass golf course, the dirt will be less diverse than rando well mixed pile of literally everything from 5K years ago. So again no surprise they found more antibiotic resistant bacteria in old random dirt than you'd find in my boring front lawn.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday February 21, @05:57PM
What is "antibiotics"?
Normies, journalists, and AI LLMs think they're an element or atom and behave accordingly.
Maybe around Y2K I had mild pneumonia and a z-pack cured it in a couple hours, which is made of azithromycin, made of Erythromycin, made of basically what Saccharopolyspora erythraea tries to use as a biowarfare agent against bacteria, as found in some Philippines dirt in 1952
Those are all antibiotics but in a different sense.
1) a z-pack is a licensed big pharma product thats been tested for effectiveness both dose and method of dose. IIRC the z-pack is like three pills of varying concentration of azithromycin. A z-pack is an antibiotic
2) azithromycin is doing some chemistry fuckery to erythromycin partially to make a better product partially for imaginary property licensing stuff. Croations invented it during the cold war I do not know how much was genuine and how much was "F the west" attitude, but they made a deal with Pfizer (the killer covid vaccine people are involved in all manner of things, some of them actually good). The patent ended in the 00s so before it ended they tried to flood the market to create resistance in the population so they don't "lose" money from generic sales, thats probably why I got a z-pack for mere mild pneumonia. So yeah anyway azithromycin is an antibiotic.
3) erythromycin was made by a strain of Saccharopolyspora erythraea which uses it like a biowarfare agent against bacteria. Its hard to get a straight answer about Saccharopolyspora erythraea but it seems to be a vaguely boring gram-positive anaerobe and its in a bacterial order that ranges from harmless to mildly dangerous. Typically bros with nitrogren fixing bacteria in the dirt and supposedly the order its a member of is normal and chill in many parts of the human body. If bacteria don't F with the human body the human body usually does not F with them back, in general. The bacterial order is "famous" for producing all kinds of antibiotics as chemical warfare agents as they are always fighting other bacteria, usually chemically. This is/was a very popular fish tank antibiotic. Woodword, yeah the famous one, synthesized it from scratch in 1981, which is pretty cool. erythromycin is an antibiotic.
4) Apparently a Filipino scientist sent some dirt to Eli Lilly in 1952 and that contained a strain of Saccharopolyspora erythraea that squirts out erythromycin. So, in a sense, some dirt from the Philippines is an antibiotic.
In the sense of #1 above ha ha no there are no fossilized z-packs in 5000 year old ice.
In the sense of #4 above ha ha of course duh there are antibiotics in literal dirt so pretty much all 5000 year old ice has some antibiotic bacterial strains and some other bacteria will be resistant to some level so its not much of a story.