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Antibiotics May Soon Become Useless | The Walrus (thewalrus.ca)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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As living organisms, bacteria are encoded by DNA, and DNA occasionally mutates. Sometimes genetic mutations render a bacterium immune to an antibiotic’s chemical tactics. The few cells that might escape antibiotic pressure then have a sudden advantage: with their counterparts wiped out, resources abound, and the remaining antibiotic-resistant bacteria proliferate. It’s a problem not only for the host—you or me when we are treated with an antibiotic and develop a resistant strain—but also for anyone with whom we happen to share our resistant bacteria, say, on a door handle or keyboard. In fact, most resistant bacteria develop not in people but in livestock fed antibiotics to promote growth; these resistant bacteria infect people through contaminated animal products. This is how even antibiotic “naive” people come to be infected with resistant strains of bacteria.

I see this all the time as a family doctor. A woman has a urinary tract infection. I tell her that her bacteria are resistant to this or that antibiotic, and she says, “But I’ve never taken any of those.” Welcome to the global human soup.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Your comment is confusing. Yes, genetic drift is evolution, so saying "people cite evolution" and then dismissing it is not a good approach.

Perhaps you mean it isn't natural selection, but then the trait being under balancing selection (a tradeoff between phage resistance and antibiotic resistance) is still under selection. And the presence of antibiotics shifts the balance heavily in favor of resistance even if that means decreasing resilience in the absence of antibiotics.

You say the traits are already there and just need to be expressed, so perhaps it's mutation you think is not happening. That's often the case, but it still took mutation to create the means of resistance to begin with. Some of it is passed around on plasmids, but they the traits had to evolve in the first place. In addition, once resistance becomes dominant, there is enough diversity to select for compensatory mutations that increase the fitness of the resistant bacteria. Things like compensating for cell wall weaknesses or pumps that were initially favored despite their drawbacks.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Yes, genetic drift is evolution

Not "genetic drift". Although I did forget a critical word. I meant to say "allele frequency drift" which is distinctly different than genetic drift.

Allele frequency drift simply describes a shift in how common a genetic trait exists, or is expressed, within a population group. The overall genetics of the group are the same. Even if there were no changes to the collective genetics of a population over millions of years (no evolution) you can still have allele frequency drift.

This is what I mean by "allele frequency drift isn't evolution". It's a mathematical expression of the ratio a gene is expressed within a population group. It doesn't describe any genomic changes or mutations.

The first generation can have frequency 1.0 of a trait, gen 2 can have 1.5, gen 3 can have 2.0, and then back down again over the next few generations. But generation 10 can have an (nearly) identical genome to generation 1.