A new study led by the University of Oxford has found that natural evolution of antibiotic resistance genes has maintained resistance in bacteria despite a reduction in the use of antibiotics. The findings demonstrate the importance of understanding the regulatory evolution of resistance genes to strategically combat AMR.
The study, “Regulatory fine-tuning of mcr-1 increases bacterial fitness and stabilizes antibiotic resistance in agricultural settings,” has been published in the Journal of the International Society for Microbial Ecology.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a serious and growing threat to global health, with 1.2 million people dying each year due to drug-resistant infections. The overuse and misuse of antibiotics is a major driver of AMR, and there is an urgent need to protect the efficacy of ‘last-line’ antibiotics to treat multidrug-resistant infections.
“Our study shows how evolution can rapidly stabilize resistance genes in pathogen populations, reducing the impact of restricting antibiotic consumption. Limiting consumption is one of most widely advocated strategies to combat AMR, and the main lesson of our work moving forward is that we need new, innovative strategies to actively eliminate AMR bacteria,” says Professor Craig MacLean, Department of Biology, University of Oxford
In 2017, the Chinese government banned the use of last-line antibiotic colistin as a growth promotor in animal feed in response to the rapid spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria Escherichia coli (E.coli) carrying mobile colistin resistance (MCR) genes. Bacteria carrying MCR genes are resistant to treatment with colistin and cause hard to treat drug-resistant infections in humans and animals.
2023-10-08 02:24:03
Original from phys.org rnrn