Study: Bacterial Resistance May be in Stomach

In a study published this week in Science, researchers found that stomach bacteria allowed resistance to antibiotics when added to E. coli.

Read about the study at Bloomberg.com

Read the abstract here:

Functional Characterization of the Antibiotic Resistance Reservoir in the Human Microflora
Morten O. A. Sommer,*, Gautam Dantas,*,, George M. Church

To understand the process by which antibiotic resistance genes are acquired by human pathogens, we functionally characterized the resistance reservoir in the microbial flora of healthy individuals. Most of the resistance genes we identified using culture-independent sampling have not been previously identified and are evolutionarily distant from known resistance genes. By contrast, nearly half of the resistance genes we identified in cultured aerobic gut isolates (a small subset of the gut microbiome) are identical to resistance genes harbored by major pathogens. The immense diversity of resistance genes in the human microbiome could contribute to future emergence of antibiotic resistance in human pathogens.