Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 276, Issue 1667, Pages 2521-2530Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2009.0320
Keywords
antibiotic resistance; environmental micro-organisms; antibiotic pollution; bacterial evolution; microbial ecology; infectious diseases
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Funding
- Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion [BIO2005-04278, BIO2008-00090]
- European Union [LSHM-CT-2005-518152, LSHM-CT-2005-018705]
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Antibiotics are among the most valuable compounds used for fighting human diseases. Unfortunately, pathogenic bacteria have evolved towards resistance. One important and frequently forgotten aspect of antibiotics and their resistance genes is that they evolved in non-clinical (natural) environments before the use of antibiotics by humans. Given that the biosphere is mainly formed by micro-organisms, learning the functional role of antibiotics and their resistance elements in nature has relevant implications both for human health and from an ecological perspective. Recent works have suggested that some antibiotics may serve for signalling purposes at the low concentrations probably found in natural ecosystems, whereas some antibiotic resistance genes were originally selected in their hosts for metabolic purposes or for signal trafficking. However, the high concentrations of antibiotics released in specific habitats (for instance, clinical settings) as a consequence of human activity can shift those functional roles. The pollution of natural ecosystems by antibiotics and resistance genes might have consequences for the evolution of the microbiosphere. Whereas antibiotics produce transient and usually local challenges in microbial communities, antibiotic resistance genes present in gene-transfer units can spread in nature with consequences for human health and the evolution of environmental microbiota that are largely ignored.
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