Soil samples from Canadian farmland reveal previously unknown antibiotic resistance genes, a finding that might help researchers better understand how to combat antibiotic resistance.PIXABAY, OADTZFarm soil harbors abundant genes related to antibiotic resistance in microbes, including some that have never been identified in human pathogens, according to a study published Friday (June 16) in Applied and Environmental Microbiology. Researchers identified novel gene products, including peptides and enzymes, that can provide resistance to classes of antibiotics used to combat a range of bacterial infections, including those that cause strep throat and chlamydia.
“There are certainly, in the environment, cryptic antibiotic resistance genes that have yet to be transferred to human pathogens,” study coauthor Edward Topp, an environmental scientist at University of Western Ontario, London, and also Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, tells The Scientist in an email.
Topp and colleagues collected soil samples from farm plots in London, Canada, that the team had exposed to antibiotics for up to 16 years. The researchers extracted DNA from the samples, then cloned fragments of specific sequences into a strain of E. coli sensitive to antibiotics. When the researchers put the altered E. coli in petri dishes with various antibiotics, they saw some colonies were able to grow, indicating the transfected DNA fragments conferred resistance. Through sequencing, they identified 34 new ...
