In the depths of Scarisoara cave in Romania sits one of the world’s biggest underground glaciers, a monumental slab of ice the size of roughly 40 Olympic swimming pools that began to form around 13,000 years ago.Scientists studying ancient microbes once entombed in the cave’s ice say a bacterial strain they thawed and analyzed is resistant to 10 modern antibiotics used to treat diseases such as urinary tract infections and tuberculosis.While there’s no evidence the bacteria are harmful to humans, awakening microbes that have lain dormant for thousands of years may sound like the plot of a sci-fi novel or movie. The new research, however, demonstrates how resistance has, in certain cases, evolved naturally in the environment, long before modern antibiotics were ever developed or prescribed by doctors.AdvertisementAdvertisement“Ancient bacteria can resist modern antibiotics because antibiotic resistance is an ancient evolutionary characteristic that was shaped over millions of years by competition between microbes,” said Cristina Purcarea, a senior scientist at the department of microbiology at the Institute of Biology Bucharest of the Romanian Academy, and senior author of the study that published this week in the scientific journal Frontiers in Microbiology.As they mix with one another over the course of millions of years, bacteria can share useful traits by exchanging small pieces of DNA, even between unrelated bacterial species, in an evolutionary arms race. This survival strategy has, coincidentally, resulted in some strains of bacteria being unaffected by certain antibiotics, dr …
