2018-12-01_Discover

any antibiotic resistance genes to
share. You just have to be sure the
bacteria don’t escape the factory.)
While promising in concept — and
worth pursuing, according to Dantas
— the process would be far too
expensive to ill the world’s sewers and
cesspools, and even in the near future
would probably be practical only in
antibiotic hot spots such as hospitals.
So the ultimate answer might be to
deploy living bacteria after all, which
would ourish wherever antibiotics
accumulate. Researchers including
Church are hard at work trying to
mitigate the risks. One promising
approach is to spread out the essential
genes across the bacteria’s entire
genome, rather than clustering them
all in one place. Since genetic material
tends to get shared between bacteria
in chunks, and many genes are needed
to disarm antibiotics, pathogens
would be unlikely to acquire the
whole package.
Meanwhile, scientists are
learning why bacteria engage in the
seemingly counterintuitive behavior
of eating substances meant to kill
them. Antibiotics are ancient, as is
antibiotic resistance — evolutionary
consequences of competition in
the world’s soils. Dantas now sees
antibiotic catabolism as just another
part of this bigger survival game.
“Antibiotics are not these weird
privileged molecules,” says Dantas.
“Any carbon source that’s not utilized
is one that’s wasted, and nature abhors
a vacuum.”
Even if humans don’t invent
the means to clean up the ow of
antibiotics, bacteria will probably
igure it out on their own. It just isn’t
likely to happen before pathogens
attain resistance and wreak havoc
on human civilization. D

Jonathon Keats is most recently the
author of You Belong to the Universe:
Buckminster Fuller and the Future
(Oxford University Press).

December 2018^ DISCOVER^67

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