LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Samples were collected from a part of Lechuguilla Cave in Carlsbad Cavern National Park in New Mexico. The cave has been cut off from any input from the surface for four million to seven million years.

"This supports a growing understanding that antibiotic resistance is natural, ancient," and an integral part of the genetic heritage of microbes, researchers from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario say.
 
Scientists have long debated the relative roles of humans and nature in the evolution and spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which can pose a serious problem in the treatment of diseases.

Infectious disease researcher Gerry Wright and his colleagues isolated 93 strains of bacteria from the cave, finding that the majority of them were resistant to multiple antibiotics. Some were resistant to as many as 14, suggesting that antibiotic resistance is "common and widespread" in "pristine" environments, the study said.

The bacteria used two methods to resist antibiotics that had never even been seen before.
Wright says that the diversity of antibiotic resistance among cave bacteria suggests there could also be undiscovered antibiotics among them.

This serves as a warning that antibiotics should be used cautiously in order to avoid helping kinds of antibiotic resistance that exist in nature from moving into other kinds of bacteria.

"We can say to doctors, 'while this isn't a problem right now, it could be in the future so you need be aware of this pre-existing resistance and be prepared if it emerges in the clinic. Or you are going to have a problem,'" Hazel Barton, a University of Akron biologist who co-authored the paper, said in a statement.

The researchers think some bacteria in the cave may have evolved to produce antibiotic compounds to out compete other bacteria in a harsh environment with limited resources.

Other bacteria, in turn, evolved antibiotic resistance as a defense mechanism.

Wright speculates that this "suggests that there are far more antibiotics in the environment that could be found and used to treat currently untreatable infections."

Wright has previously found antibiotic resistance genes in other ancient bacteria. Wright and his colleagues reported such genes in bacteria last year that had been frozen in permafrost for at least 30,000 years.

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