New study links common herbicides and antibiotic resistance
canterbury.ac.nz
canterbury.ac.nz
How long is it taking to acknowledge that even a relatively inactive material - plastics - produced without restraint, can devastate ocean life and lead to who knows what destruction or disease, when some tiny little marvels eventually adapt to eat them ?
We must prioritise employment of natural materials simply and plainly because they are less disruptive to biology and more predictable by the knowledge and observation of their fitness in natural systems and natural history.
Of all our industries mass agriculture should be the most careful and symbiotic with environment and biology. Medicine, quarantined lab research, and exceptional problem cases - this is where novel materials and processes belong. Not sprayed across millions of acres and in our loved ones bellies.
Fwiw, however, the top reddit commentor feels that this specific paper is bullshit science:
So, i'm currently reading through the paper (and i'll leave comments where appropriate), but the immediate thing I noticed when reading through the Methods section is that one of the antibiotics they used as a general comparator is ciprofloxacin (Cip), which is also a herbicide.
It's a dual herbicide/antibiotic, as it inhibits DNA gyrase activity in both plants and bacteria (we use it fairly often in our plant lab as a growth inhibitor).
I feel like, if not controlled for, this could mess with their results.
Edit: Whoa, that's a bit strange. In their Culturing Conditions section, they state they only used Cip with the bacteria and not the other antibiotics.
That is definitely going to mess with your results.
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/9nivyf/a_new_study...
The CIP only experiment was conducted to test a separate hypothesis and clearly sub sectioned: " Herbicide-induced changes in MSC can occur without a change in MIC .... To test this, we measured the frequency at which acquired ciprofloxacin resistance arose during culture in the combination of Cip + Kamba + E. coli "
Its no coincidence that various antibiotics have herbicidal qualities - the study is conducted to gain some information on potential interplay of these classes of substance.
"Neither reducing the use of antibiotics nor discovery of new ones may prevent the postantibiotic era. This is because bacteria may be exposed to other non-antibiotic chemicals that predispose them to evolve resistance to antibiotics more quickly"
Can someone who understands this stuff explain to why this is the case. Surely bateria will only evolve resistance to the specific mechanism the antibiotic/herbicide uses to attack the bacteria? Are Roundup and antibiotics using the same mechanism to kill batericia?
Doesn't antibiotic resistance come at a cost? Would not a new antibiotic that uses a new mechanism of killing bacteria be effective regardless of herbicide use?
This can have a different meaning from your slightly abbreviated version - the "may" has more ambiguity and in context means they may fail. Your shortened version more suggests the strategies cannot succeed. The authors must themselves understand this stuff to a good extent and follow their assessment "this is because..." Your questions are to a different statement "couldnt they succeed like this...?"
Maybe